Sunday's coming!

  Luke 12: 49-56,   Jeremiah 23: 23-29.   Susan and I are just back from a week camping. Life is more simple : go to bed when it gets dark and hope the milk would be ok for breakfast without a fridge to put it in. The biggest worry was the weather, and there was no electricity on site to charge the phones & use them to find a forecast - so the best plan was to wake up & look.  What sort of day does it look like today?   But I realised that the other worries of life were not very far away. If you haven’t heard the news for a few days you can start to wonder how things are going in the search for peace in Ukraine.. or ceasefire in Gaza, or whether some power-mad leader will have done something provocative and stupid and we’ll find the world is in chaos. And how’s the dog doing in kennels? And did the milkman remember to stop delivering, or is the doorstop full of bottles? And is my body really coping with the activity of camping as well as it did...

  Luke 11: 1-13   Earlier in the service we enjoyed the Lord’s prayer as a reflective story. You can find the script here  at BIble Reading Fellowship   It might have left you wondering What does it mean to pray?   Jesus is asked by his disciples to teach them to pray – and he gives them the words which even 2000 year later we call “the Lord’s Prayer”.   Maybe sometimes praying is using someone else’s wise words to express what we need to say to God – as the story we heard earlier showed us.   But Jesus wants his followers to know not only some really good words to use when we pray, but to understand what prayer is.   Many people think that prayer is asking God for the things we need: and in part it is. But Jesus wants his followers to know that when we pray we are in a relationship with God, who loves us beyond our imagining.   So how does God respond to our prayers?   Jesus tells this funny little para...

 Colossians 1: 15-28, Luke 10: 38-42 When my parents were the age I am now, they moved from Merthyr to Chippenham. They had both retired in their mid 50s, but still kept busy with many tasks as Elders in the URC. My dad was a practical person, who was one of the few to really understand how the church heating system worked - but he was also known for his good sense and keen moral compass. My mum had run the junior church for nearly 20 years, plus a youth club, and a Pilots company, and had a knack for getting young people singing, learning & making things.  But now in their early 60s they were both feeling ready to slow down a bit, and had decided they needed a smaller house, fewer hills & not so many church jobs.    So they moved to a small house in Chippenham, and joined a URC where they were treated more like retired people, and enjoyed the fact that the walk into town was flatter.     And someone at church suggested they might like...

Luke 10: 25-37 I would be most surprised if any of us here did not know what we thought a ‘Good Samaritan’ is. We even have the organisation “The Samaritans” – set up to listen to and help people.   So we might think we know exactly what the story of Jesus – of the man mugged and ultimately helped by a Samaritan – is telling us. Jesus tells the story to answer the question “who is my neighbour?”. If this story from Jesus helps us realise that the neighbour is the one who steps in and helps – even if it is the one we least expect to help – then it is a story worth reading.   You can find some really heart-warming modern stories which echo exactly Jesus’ story of the person you least expect acting as a true loving neighbour.   I found this story. In May 2023, a   60 year old prison guard in Louisiana, Roberta Bell, heard that one of the women in the facility where she worked was about to give birth … and because they had no facilities at the prison, the b...

 Proper 9 ;  2 Kings 5:1-14 It feels like the most dangerous time for the people of the Middle East.   Israel is said to be considering a 60 day ceasefire in Gaza: but the atrocities of October 7 th 2023, carried out by Hamas, are still brutally alive in many Israeli people’s memories. Meanwhile Palestinians in Gaza may well feel that after so many hundreds of people being killed trying to get aid, as well as the recent attack on a beach-front café in Gaza, the most they can hope for is a gap in the hostilities, rather than true lasting peace. Against this back-drop, President Trump has ended US sanctions against Syria; and supported Israeli attacks against nuclear facilities in Iran.   These are dangerous times – and so it feels like a difficult time to read the Old Testament, as it documents some of the ancient battles between these warring enemies.   These are the Hebrew Scriptures, the foundational stories of Judaism: some would argue...