Sunday's coming!

Luke 2:22-40 Tomorrow, February 2nd, is exactly 40 days after Christmas Day and our celebration of the birth of Jesus. During those 40 days we have been celebrating Epiphany – all the many ways in which we see God revealed in our world, the many different glimpses that Jesus Christ gives us of just what it means to have God here with us. We have heard the story of how Mary & Jospeh brought Jesus to the temple, at 40 days old, in accordance with the Jewish law.  The law of Moses states that families were commanded to present their male children at the Temple in Jerusalem, to give thanks to God and pray for the purification of the mother and health of the child, because it was considered that after the vital forty-day period it was almost certain that all mortal danger was passed. This is a perfectly normal event in the life of any Jewish family but what happens shows us that this is not an ordinary family. Luke tells us this story because he believ...

On Saturday I will be in Tavistock, at a service to celebrate the new roof: they chose Romans 12 1-18 as the text - and perhaps I got a bit carried away with the idea of celebration... Today is undoubtedly a day of celebration. And if, like me, you are a fan of a certain hit Saturday night BBC show that reaches its final at Christmas each year, then you will (strictly) associate celebration with dancing ! I like to think St Paul would have agreed with me – because he certainly advocates some dance theology in his letter to the Romans. Don’t you just love reading someone else’s letters? Paul is writing to the church in Rome, because he is planning to come and visit them. He begins with his usual giving thanks to God for the church, sending greetings to people he knows, and then he starts addressing what seems to be some trouble that has arisen for the Roman church. It seems there’s a problem with followers of Christ with a Jewish background, and ot...