Sunday's coming!

James 3: 1-12, Mark 8: 27-38 I wonder if you ever find yourself reading a passage of scripture and think “I’ve never noticed that before?”.  It happens to me so often that I’m starting to think that while my back is turned someone keeps putting new bits in my Bible. This week’s reading from Mark hit me that way this week. I know this story from Mark – it comes right in the middle of Mark’s gospel & is something of a staging post between the stuff Jesus has been doing up until then –healing, teaching & getting criticized and the second half of Mark’s gospel, where will see Jesus getting crucified, dying and rising again. So here in Mark’s gospel is a change of direction in the story of Jesus – and Jesus asks the question of his disciples ‘who do you say that I am?’. There follows the disciples’ discussion of who others say Jesus is – Jeremiah, Elijah or one of the prophets and then Peter states “you are the Messiah”. But I realised readin...

Isaiah 35: 4-7a. Mark 7: 24-37 Here is a sentence you will not often hear me utter. I feel sorry for David Cameron. Back in the middle of August he made an unguarded comment about the ‘swarm’ of migrants waiting to cross the English Channel. He was immediately accused of dehumanizing desperate people who often risk their lives to get to a country where they believe their lives will be safer. In just the last two weeks the word ‘swarm’ has come back to haunt David Cameron, as we have all been shocked by the stories of people dying in lorries in Austria, crowds desperate to board trains in Hungary and of course this week’s terrible image of 2 year old Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian boy who died in the sea off Turkey together with his mother and brother. Suddenly we are waking up to the idea that these are people who need to be helped, not a sub-human ‘swarm’, a pest and a problem. I feel sorry for David Cameron because I doubt that he meant his words to be dis...