Sunday's coming!

 1 Timothy 6: 6-19  (also a harvest service & chapel anniversary!) I don’t know if you caught the story in the news this week that it’s 70 years since the first advert was shown on ITV – it was for …Gibbs toothpaste. And watching it, it was really just trying to persuade us to use that toothpaste and not another sort of toothpaste.   Since that time, advertising has become a multi-billion pound industry, and we all might have our favourite ad – one that has intrigued us (the mysterious, adventurous figure in black delivering Milk Tray?) or made us sing a long (a million housewives every day pick up a can of beans and say…?) or one that has made us laugh (the Smash aliens?).   Adverts are there to make us aware of products, but more than that to make us want them, they make us buy more, eventually they can make us want everything, so that we are deeply dissatisfied with what we have.   In contrast to all that, Paul’s letter to Timothy has some sen...

  Luke 16: 1-13 - with a harvest 'flavour'. With our harvest celebrations here/ approaching, it’s easy to sit back and just say “harvest is a wonderful time (though we know it’s hard work). We come to church to rest and give thanks and enjoy the bounty that God has provided”. There’s nothing wrong with that – being grateful and praising God is definitely part of what we need to do.   But today we are faced with a really intriguing and really difficult parable of Jesus, which poses the question to us – what are you going to do with everything you’ve got?   At first reading, it seems as if Jesus is telling a story that approves of the dishonesty of the chief character – and that can’t be right, can it??   Of all the parables Jesus told, this might be the one we might wish he hadn’t bothered with! It is what theologians call a real stinker.  It is an intriguing story though.   The manager is accused of being dishonest (we are never told...

 Luke 15: 1-10 I am infamous for my inability to remember the name of a film, or even (reliably) the names of stars who were in it. And yet, there are scenes and snippets of dialogue I can recall clearly, and within 5 minutes of starting to watch a film I can often say “oh I’ve seen this before”.   So it’s no surprise that I can remember a scene in a film about an American President in which, like Jesus, he is accused of mixing with the wrong sorts of people. The president – played by a clean-cut type, perhaps Michael Douglas? – is being asked by the press whether he is friends with a business man who has been involved in a shady deal. His first thought is to deny being friends with the man, but his press officer advises him to take a different tack. ‘If they say “are you friends?” you say “no we’re good friends”. If they ask “are you good friends? You say “no, we were the best of friends”.   You step towards the questions – you leave them nowhere to go.’ ...

Deueronomy 30: 15-20,   Luke 14: 25-33   This week September has crept up on us and arrived with not so much a bang as a downpour. As the children around us return to school, we might have remembered this week to offer up a little prayer for them. Our grandchildren are just starting out in year 13 & 11: what I still think of as the upper sixth and the fifth form – in other words Rose will do her A levels at the end of this school year and Jonah will do his GSCEs – and both of them will need to make decisions pretty soon about what they want to do in the next stage of their lives, and what exam results they might need to get there.   Life can seem hard for the children in our families, or the children we know from our streets: it feels as though there are more choices than ever in their lives, and yet so many pressures to endure and temptations to resist.   The work of schools is to help young people navigate the choices of this world and make good ch...

  Luke 13: 10-17 To be in pain is a terrible thing.  To be unable to move freely is a real impediment to a full and happy life.  People who are wheelchair users describe how hard it is to be taken seriously when everyone else towers above you. So imagine how hard life was for the woman Jesus meets in the synagogue who is bent double and has been for 18 years, experiencing all of those things.   What do you think you would find most difficult if you were bent right over?   In fact we don’t have to just imagine it, because in 2019 there was a story on the news of Li Huan – a Chinese man, nicknamed “the folded man” because he had been bent right over for more than 20 years by an extreme version of ankylosing spondylitis. His chin was on his chest and his face against his thigh bone.   His mother cared for him, helped him to wash, to eat, to get around and about; but at the age of 71 she was beginning to worry about what would happen to him when ...