Sunday's coming!

  Matthew 25: 31-46 As my job as moderator involves driving from Taunton to cover the area from Falmouth to Swindon, I spend a lot of time in the car, listening to Radio Four. I was fascinated this week to hear a trailer for the first of this year’s Reith Lectures, to be given by Dr Atul Gawande on “The Future of Medicine”. In the first lecture, “Why do Doctors Fail?”, Gawande explores the nature of imperfection in medicine. In particular, he examines how much of failure in medicine remains due to ignorance (lack of knowledge) and how much is due to ineptitude (failure to use existing knowledge). His suggestion is that more lives could be saved by doctors if they got on with applying what they already know about medicine, consolidating knowledge, if you like, rather than spending so much time and effort pushing back the boundaries of what we know – learning new stuff. This got me thinking about our lives trying to follow Jesus, to live as good Christ...

Matthew 25: 14-30 I expect there are at least some people here who share my love of puzzles – sudoko, crosswords, brain-teasers: I find it hard to walk away from an unsolved challenge. Perhaps that is why I love parables so much: they tease our brains, we wonder what they are about, and we try to work out their relevance to us. So today we heard the parable of the talents. 3 servants are each given a number of ‘talents’ and treat those talents differently. When the owner returns from a long time away, he asks them each what they have done with the talents they were given, and rewards them or punishes them according to what they have done. Some people read this story about ‘talents’ quite literally and conclude that Jesus is telling us not to waste the talents – the gifts and abilities God has given us. Unfortunately, this is ignoring the fact that Jesus probably told the story in Aramaic and it was recorded in Greek – so it is really just a coincide...

Psalm 78:1-7, Matthew 25:1-13 Confession: I have been very busy this week & 'stole' most of this sermon from Susan Durber's sermon on the the United Reformed Church website. That's probably why it's better than usual! As we commemorate remembrance Sunday this year we are marking 100 years since the outbreak of the First World War. Edward Grey, the man who was British Foreign Secretary as the First World War began, is remembered as the man who said, at the outbreak of war “the lamps are going out all over Europe”. He wrote in his memoirs, ‘A friend came to see me on one of the evenings of the last week — he thinks it was on Monday, August 3rd. We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office. It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking. My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words: "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again...

This was last week's sermon - didn't get posted as I was away from my desk from the Thursday. Sorry. Gospel reading was Matthew 22: 34-46 Who is Jesus?   That might seem like a huge question, but it is one which I think resonates through each gospel (each of which, after all, was written to try to answer the question) and is as important a question for each of us as ever it was for the first followers of Jesus. In the section of Matthew we’ve had in the lectionary over the last few weeks there have been questions to Jesus – some from the Sadducees, some from the Pharisees: there have been questions on divorce, authority, taxes, resurrection and now the law. Matthew states that these questions are put to ‘test’ or to ‘trap’ Jesus, but perhaps there was also a genuine desire to find out whose side Jesus was on, what he stands for, who should rally to his cause. Who is Jesus? Or perhaps whose is Jesus? But Jesus shows no interest in claiming support fro...