Sunday's coming!

Isaiah 40: 21-31 Mark 1: 29-39 I want you to imagine a pendulum. Swinging, slowly, to & fro. Not so I can lull you to sleep, I hope, but to help us to explore our readings this morning and think about what they mean for us. Whenever people think about God, they tend to set up ideas which seem to be opposite, and the pendulum starts to swing. Surely God is high above everything we know, the maker of all things, the creator of everything from atoms to planets. God is vast, immense, unknowable. One end of the pendulum has people describing God in this lofty, magnificent, splendid way. Isaiah paints a picture of a God who sits so far from us that we look like grasshoppers in his sight “great in strength, mighty in power”. But then the gospels paint a picture of Jesus who is ‘God with us’ – down to earth, living a human life, concerned for Simon’s mother-in-law. The pendulum swings the other way as we see God right here with us, in Jesus. The wonder is that God is a...

Matthew 20: 1-16 The labourers have been hard at work: all around us there are cut fields, full barns, plentiful stores. And here in church we have the fruits of harvest – carrots, apples, bread. God has blessed us with plenty and we have come to sing our gratitude. So it’s good that we have heard a gospel reading dealing with harvest and plenty. But where we might expect gratitude we hear grumbling instead. “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat”. Jesus says ‘the kingdom of heaven is like this’ and we try really hard to nod our heads wisely as Jesus declares the largesse of the landowner, who pours out abundant grace on those who only worked one hour. We know in our heads that God loves us all with a love so outrageous and so generous that it cannot be described as ‘fair’. This parable may be trying to convince our heads that this is a story about God’s grace and we should accept that, b...

Matthew 15: 21-18, Isaiah 56: 1, 6-8 Sometimes I wonder whether to keep watching the news – it certainly doesn’t aid restful sleep, some nights. The coverage of the protests in Charlottesville, Virginia have been particularly disturbing. White supremacists, upset at the proposal to remove a statue of Robert E Lee, a general from the Confederate – pro-slavery – side of the American Civil War, marched through the streets with flaming torches chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!”. It is not surprising that anyone who was not a Southern, white, young or middle-aged man would have felt they were being warned to get of off the streets – they are ‘Our streets’ chant the mob, not your streets. Meanwhile other groups want to protest that they are also their streets, that the USA is also their country, that history should record their stories too. You will even find extremists   - in the US, in Islamic countries, in the state of Israel - who want to say that God is on t...