Sunday's coming!

I'm deeply indebted to David Lose of "Working Preacher" for his comparison of Mark's passion account with Jesus' parable - I would hate anyone to think such a brilliant idea is my own! Isaiah 64: 1-9; Mark 13: 24-37 I’m going to begin by showing the 2014 John Lewis Christmas advert, or if that isn’t possible, reminding people of it. Once again this Christmas we hear the gospel according to john Lewis. “Give someone the Christmas they’ve been dreaming of”. Monty the penguin gets what he really wants for Christmas – real love. But is Monty the penguin himself real? It depends how you look at him – in the eyes of the little boy who is his friend, of course he is real. And the love the boy has for him is real, and the new penguin for Christmas – she’s real too. “It’s real love” croons the background music.  And if that isn’t the real meaning of Christmas, I don’t know what is. But you won’t find real love at a John Lewis stor...

Based on Philippians 2; 1-11: for the closing worship of the day to celebrate one year on from the signing of our ecumenical declaration of intent on November 16th, 2014. We meet here, one year on from the signing of the declaration of Ecumenical Intent for Cornwall & it’s a good time to ask what has been, what is and what shall be. It’s good, too, to look at Paul’s letter to the Philippians, in which he writes about what has been, what is & what shall be: Paul says of Christ  - What has been : He had the nature of God, but emptied himself, gave up all he had, became like a human being. What is : As a human being was humble, he walked way of obedience – even to death on a cross What will be :  God raised him to the highest place & gave him the name over every other name. Then (although it is first in the reading, I think it is as a consequence of their identity as followers of Christ) Paul says of the church in Philippi –...

  Matthew 25: 31-46 As my job as moderator involves driving from Taunton to cover the area from Falmouth to Swindon, I spend a lot of time in the car, listening to Radio Four. I was fascinated this week to hear a trailer for the first of this year’s Reith Lectures, to be given by Dr Atul Gawande on “The Future of Medicine”. In the first lecture, “Why do Doctors Fail?”, Gawande explores the nature of imperfection in medicine. In particular, he examines how much of failure in medicine remains due to ignorance (lack of knowledge) and how much is due to ineptitude (failure to use existing knowledge). His suggestion is that more lives could be saved by doctors if they got on with applying what they already know about medicine, consolidating knowledge, if you like, rather than spending so much time and effort pushing back the boundaries of what we know – learning new stuff. This got me thinking about our lives trying to follow Jesus, to live as good Christ...

Matthew 25: 14-30 I expect there are at least some people here who share my love of 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 of 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 probably told the story in Aramaic and it was recorded in Greek – so it is really just a coincide...