Sunday's coming!

John 1: 6-8, 19-28 There is a character from the Christmas story who very rarely makes it onto the Christmas cards, although he is the ‘star’ of our Gospel reading today – John the Baptist. So I have provided you all with an image of him to take away today. This is a statue from the Charles bridge in Prague, and in this depiction John is doing what he does best.. wearing animal skins and carrying a scallop shell as a sign of baptism, and he is  pointing.   You’ll find many images of John the Baptist pointing  -         John and Jesus as infant cousins, with John pointing to Jesus; -         John in the desert, pointing to a distant figure pf Jesus coming towards the river for baptism;  -         John baptising Jesus and pointing to him as the Spirit descends in the form of a dove -         Even John standing at the cross, pointin...

  Isaiah 64: 1-7    Mark 13: 24-37 Today is Advent Sunday – a time of hope and expectation and joyfully looking forward to Christmas. But have you been keeping up with the news? Covid continues to claim lives – in the UK, across the world.. and our politicians are trying to work out how best to respond. We long to get life back to normal, to see businesses re-opening, and people meeting and hugging, to be back together physically in our churches. We long for someone to sort this out properly. And who knows what other burdens we are each carrying. Maybe we even pray for God to come and sort it out for us. Our world is really not all that different from the world that Isaiah was writing for in the passage we heard. The book of the Bible we call Isaiah was written by about three different prophets in three different times – towards the end, the part we heard is the third Isaiah – and he is speaking to God’s people at the time when they have returned to Jerusalem after being ...

  Matthew 22: 34-46 A lawyer comes to test Jesus – “Which commandment is the greatest?”.   The books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy contain pages and pages, chapters and chapters of commandments – not just the ones we call the ‘ten commandments’, but many more besides, dealing with how to live, how to walk in God’s way, how to serve justice, what to eat, property law, rules of warfare, marriage, money..   How do you choose just one? Jesus’ answer? He brings together the teaching of  many of those pages and pages of commandments into this: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”     You shall love.. says Jesus.  All of the commandments are meant to bring us to a point where we can be people w...

  One of the hardest things to bear in the last 8 months has been a sense of isolation – of being kept ‘distanced’. I have been reading a number of studies of ‘trauma’ to help understand in some way what we are all going through, and how we might respond as people of faith. I’m very grateful to our own Carla Grosch-Miller and the rest of the team at the ‘Tragedy and Congregations Project’ for the work they have done and are doing to help us understand our reactions to traumatic events and where we find God in them. I have just finished reading a chapter of their book (“Tragedies and Christian Congregations – the practical theology of trauma”) in which Meg Warner, who has just begun teaching at Northern College, states “The Bible tells us we are not alone”. Meg Warner points out that a huge amount of the writing of the books of the Bible is produced in the aftermath of some kind of trauma – slavery, famine, exile, invasion, crucifixion.    The Bible tells us we are not alo...

Exodus 20: 1-4, 7-9, 12-20       Matthew 21: 33-46 Here we go again – harvest. We’re singing (or mumbling behind our masks) ‘Come ye thankful people, come’ with its line about ‘all is safely gathered in e’er the winter storms begin’ with one eye on the window thinking ‘the winter storms are here already’. And if the actual weather wasn’t bad enough, we are in the middle of the metaphorical storm of the coronavirus pandemic. The temptation might be to change our focus to the warm hues of autumnal fruit and flowers, and allow ourselves to revel a little in the cozy, traditional, apple-scented memories of harvest-home. But I think God’s word wants to say more to us than that.   We heard the story from Exodus chapter 20 where the Lord ‘who brought you up out of Egypt’ gives the people of God the ten commandments. There are of course commandments dealing with worship of God and God alone, about keeping the Sabbath and honouring our parents, and a list of the things which ...

Psalm 114,   Matthew 18: 21-35   I heard a church leader this week suggest that people in their church were far keener to return to the church building for the Harvest Festival than they were to get back to celebrate what is said to be the pinnacle of the church year - Easter.    Perhaps some of that is about the timing of the two festivals in the course of this pandemic; perhaps some of it is about the place that harvest festival has in our hearts, with all the smells and tastes of autumn produce; but I’d like to think that at least some of it is that harvest puts us back in touch with the natural world. And perhaps our sense of belonging to the natural world has been heightened by our experiences over the last 6 months.   Unless you subscribe to some of the especially extreme conspiracy theories, the Covid19 epidemic is a natural phenomenon. Any virus is part of the created order, and so can be studied. We know how small viruses are, we understand how they ‘wo...

Genesis 45. 1-15 ,  Matthew 15. 21-28 Today We’re back! Well, some of us.. in masks… keeping an appropriate distance. At times during the pandemic I have found myself describing the virus as being like a lens- magnifying those things which were there before.  We have seen that neighbourly care can be really important; that we all need hugs; that too much news makes you tetchy; that nothing tastes better than a freshly -baked loaf of bread; that our homes are important, but they’re not everything; and that we miss our friends from church.   And what about our faith? I think I have learned that I need to make time to stop each day and pray and read my Bible; that I am aware of relying on God much more when life is difficult; and that I somehow need to share my faith more with the people around me.     I’m sure you have your own things you have learned.   One of the things that we’ve missed is the opportunity to come together in our churches. Here we can share...