Sunday's coming!

I did preach on Advent Sunday - but sadly, just as I had finished my sermon notes my Hard Drive died. It is now replaced but of course the sermon has gone! I made some notes in long hand (using paper & pen) & I'm not sure anyone noticed on Sunday - but it does mean there is no electronic version of the what I said. Sorry. Thank goodness I'd saved the Advent ideas here, though - because that has gone, too!

I'm very grateful to Neil Thorogood of Westminster College for his ideas about Advent downloadable here , along with a whole host of ideas from the wonderful Westminster staff. I've decided to have a theme running through Advent: "The Gifts God can't wait to give". (Yes, I also owe inspiration to the John Lewis ad here - if you haven't seen it (It still makes me cry when I watch - I think its beautifully filmed & a lovely sound track). So, each Sunday of Advent I will pull out of my modified John Lewis bag (modified to read 'God's Advent - for gifts God can't wait to give) a symbol of the Advent theme for that week, as an intro into the sermon. This means I now need to sit down and decide what my theme will be for each week of Advent - but when I've done it, it could take a lot of the heat out of preparing worship for the next 5 weeks! So here's the outline: Advent 1 Theme = hope Isaiah 64:1-9 Mark 13:24-37 ‘The day of the L...

Christ the King In a week where the news has been full of further protests against banking practices, unrest in the Arab nations, and financial questions about the euro, unemployment and recession, it might be tempting to look for a breather when you come to church. But I think our Bible readings today make us think about our world and question still further: Where is God when life is difficult and unfair? What use is prayer when we’re struggling? Why can’t the Bible help us to make ethical decisions about money or power or what to do with our lives? I'm particularly struck by the Ezekiel passage. Three times we find the phrase, in the words spoken by the Lord God 'I myself..'. I myself will search for my sheep. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep. I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. You might think all this ‘sheep’ talk is a long way from where we are. But clearly, through Ezekiel, God is wanting to tell his people that he will car...

Readings for this week include: Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 and Matthew 25:31-4 Perhaps because I've been looking at the Matthew for the last few weeks, I'm particularly struck by the Ezekiel passage. Three times we find the phrase, in the words spoken by the Lord God 'I myself..'. I myself will search for my sheep I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. The theme of judgement is of course taken up in the parable, too. But I think I want to focus on Christ as God incarnate - God as 'I myself'. Christ's care for the sheep - the good shepherd who searches & tends. & then Christ's demand, as King, that we act as those who live by his rules - searching, caring, tending, for the lost sheep of our world.

Yes, gentle reader, some of this is the same as last week - that's the beauty of being in four different churches - I felt some of it was equally relevant this week Many people know how much I like puzzles – sudoko, crosswords, brain-teasers: I find it hard to walk away from an unsolved challenge. Perhaps that is why I love parables so much: they tease our brains, we wonder what they are about, and we try to work out their relevance to us. So today we heard the parable if the talents. 3 servants are each given a number of ‘talents’ and treat those talents differently. When the owner returns from a long time away, he asks them each what they have done with the talents they were given, and rewards them or punishes them according to what they have done. Some people read this story about ‘talents’ quite literally and conclude that Jesus is telling us not to waste the talents – the gifts and abilities God has given us. Unfortunately, this is ignoring the fact that Jesus probabl...

Some of you might remember the Ian Dury song of the same name 'what a waste' (if you get the same 'thrashy' ad first I do apologise - Ian Dury is much better!). It's kept going round in my head this week as I've been contemplating Remembrance Sunday and (especially) the Gospel reading for this Sunday - the parable of the Talents. I think the idea of being 'called to account' frightens many of us - but accountability is an important part of life. So, reading Matthew 25: 14-30 in the context of the whole of the chapter I am left with the question of how we spend our lives, rater than waste them: spend time instead of wasting it - maybe even 'spend' rather than waste our remembrance. I'm hoping this will make more sense when I sit down to flesh it out - meanwhile I still have the thrid of three funerals to conduct this week - so maybe that explains why I'm more than usually concerned with how we spend and don't waste what God gives...

Very late posting this week - I have really had to wrestle with Matthew 25: 1-13! So this Sunday is the 3rd before Advent, which means that Christmas is starting to loom on the horizon. I don’t know about you, but I am simultaneously intrigued and frustrated by those little puzzles that you sometimes get as Christmas presents. I’m the sort of person who can’t really rest until the puzzle is solved. I might force myself to put it down from time to time, but I can’t stop myself from coming back to it to have another go at solving it. Christmas Day and Boxing Day can be seriously eaten into by the frustration of a puzzle which is difficult to solve. A bit like a parable really. Especially this parable. All week I’ve been reading, re-reading – trying to solve the puzzle – what is the point of this parable? What is Jesus trying to teach us by telling it? Matthew has Jesus conclude the parable with ‘Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour’. I see how this fit...