Sunday's coming!

       Psalm 103: v1-8         Matthew 18: 21-35             We celebrate our harvest today – bringing our thanks to God for all the richness of the earth with which God blesses us every year. It is a time to give thanks and a time to rejoice in God’s love. And yet, however long we have been aware of the love God has for us, it feels as if we human beings need to keep learning what unconditional love really means.   Jesus tells this story of 2 servants and their king to try to help us grasp how God’s loving care of us all works in our lives. And yet we often call this parable the story of the unforgiving servant – and make it into a warning about how if we are unforgiving like that servant, we could get punished like him.   We hold onto the way in which the servant, who has been forgiven a massive debt, pursues a much smaller debt from another servant, because he ha...

           Ezekiel 47: 1-9     John 7: 37-39   At last.. the rain has come. In a total reversal of the usual way of things, where the rain seems to come just as the schools have broken up for the summer, we had a very sunny dry summer – including just about the whole of the school holiday – and now the rain has come for a rather damp ‘back to school’ feel.   But this year, more than ever, we have been glad to see the rain fall. Everywhere grass was looking not just dry, but bleached white – I seriously wondered whether the grass could recover. But we’ve all noticed the green shoots appear, once the rain started to fall. Life was just waiting for things to change.   The Orthodox Church has invited all churches to join them on this first Sunday of September to mark a “feast of creation” in the churches.   This marks the beginning of the season of creation, when we have our harvest festivals ...