Sunday's coming!

2 Kings 5:1-14            We heard the story of the healing of Naaman the Syrian. One way of approaching this or any Bible Story is to ask where you see God acting in this story, where you are in the story,   and therefore where you might expect to see God working in your life. It is easy to see God acting in this story. Naaman, the commander of the army of Aram – what we would call Syria – is a war hero, but he has leprosy. His wife’s slave-girl tells her mistress that Elisha, the prophet of God, would be able to cure him. Naaman pulls strings and gets the King of Aram to send him to Israel with a huge amount of money and a letter to the King of Israel. The king thinks this is a trap – that the King of Aram is trying to find a reason to pick a fight, after all no-one can cure leprosy ! But Elisha knows that God can cure   - even leprosy – even someone who is not from God’s people – even without the prophet of God leaving the house t...

Proverbs 25: 6-7     Luke 14: 1, 7-14 I have a confession to make. (don’t get over-excited, it’s not the sort of thing you can use to blackmail someone). Before this week I hadn’t realised that Jesus’ words of advice to a guest at a banquet – don’t assume you should have a top spot and get demoted, but take a humble place so that someone will say ‘come up higher!’ – were based on a little snippet from Proverbs. “ Do not put yourself forward in the king's presence or stand in the place of the great; for it is better to be told, "Come up here," than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.” Jesus is giving good practical advice about not thinking too highly of yourself & not being embarrassed as a result. But since when did the Son of God come to dispense good social advice? Just last week the lectionary reading from Luke’s gospel told us the story of the woman bent double – a ‘daughter of Abraham’, healed on the Sabbath. If you turn over a...

Today’s Gospel passage has to be one of the most memorable in the Bible. Even people who know almost nothing about the Bible often know the story of “The Good Samaritan”. When Chad Varah was looking for a name for his telephone listening service to help people who were feeling suicidal, he settled on the name “Samaritans”. But of course, when Jesus first told the story a ‘Samaritan’ was something quite different. A Samaritan was the person you least expected to help – the sort of person a self-respecting Jew would cross the street to avoid, not a person to help or to expect to receive help from. Remember how in telling the story of Jesus meeting the woman at the well, John’s gospel (4: 9) states: The Samaritan woman said to Jesus, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans). Jesus tells this story of the man beaten up on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and sets up a scenario where the Priest an...