Sunday's coming!

  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 ...