Sunday's coming!

Gone a bit "off piste" with the lectionary this week - preaching on Habukkuk 3: 17-19 and Luke 13: 1-9 You may have barely heard of Habukkuk – you might, like me, have trouble spelling his name – but I promise you, you will want to know the question he asks. About 600 years before Jesus – time after Assyria conquered God’s people in the land of Judah – and the Babylonians or Chaldeans ruling Judah instead. The tiny land of God’s people has just breathed out from one invasion, and then another comes. And in the midst of it the prophet Habakkuk asks ‘what does it mean to say God is with us, if it doesn’t mean safety and success?’.   If we are God’s people; if God is with us; why is it all going so wrong? More importantly, can we still believe in God when life is at its toughest?   Habbakuk’s answer is a kind of poem: The fig tree has no buds The vine bears no harvest,   The olive crop fails, The orchards yield no food, The fold is bereft of its flock, And there are no cattl...

Luke 4:1-13 Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16 I have a confession to make. I have been a minister of the URC for nearly 29 years and I think every sermon I ever preached about Lent has been wrong. I have tried, year after year, to understand what temptation might be about, to ask how we might resist temptation, and I’ve encouraged people to use Lent to give up something, to better appreciate all that we have when the feast of Easter comes. In lots of different ways I think I have said that Lent is about recognising that we have enough – that we should not want more. So when a famished Jesus is tempted with bread – I have preached that he bravely says ‘no, I will resist it’ – and we too can resist those chocolates, or alcohol, or whatever  - and either give the money we save to charity or the time we free up to study and pray. But finally, I think, I’m ready to say ‘NO’ this Lent to all that puritanically - minded stuff. This year I have seen the temptation of Jesus in a different light. The dev...

  When the world all seems too much, I give myself a break by watching the BBC’s     “the Repair Shop” If you haven’t seen it, I can thoroughly recommend it as a life-affirming programme! People bring a ‘treasured object’ which is broken or simply worn by the passage of time, and various experts set to work to mend, restore and, well, repair the object. The highlight is the moment when the person returns for their toy, or furniture, or whatever, and the utter delight on their faces as the memories of what that object meant comes flooding back. Often they want to touch, handle, even stroke their possession: there is something about the physical object that makes all the emotions flow. I usually need a tissue at that point. No amount of telling the story or hearing the history can compare with the sight, smell, sound touch of that thing – right there in their arms.   God knows this is how people work. John 1: 14   The Word became flesh and made his dwelling a...

  Ephesians 6:10-20   I wonder if any of you have ever worn armour? I have only tried on the odd piece of armour at National Trust houses – balancing a helmet on my head; picking up chain mail – so heavy!; trying to imagine how hard it would be to move with a breastplate on. I’ve more than once come to the conclusion that armour is not for me – I’m very glad I’ve never been required even to wear full armour, let alone to fight. I’m too feeble, probably too cowardly.   So I’ve never really been drawn to this passage about putting on the whole armour of God – until this week. I read in a commentary that the author of the letter – who may have been Paul or may have been one of his closest associates - decided to use the image of the armour to sum up the whole of the letter.    I decided to read the whole of the letter to the Ephesians and see what it says altogether, and how the image of the armour fits in. In some translations, the passage we heard starts ‘Finally...

Proverbs 9: 1-6 John 6: 51-58   On Friday I was listening to Radio 4’s book of the week ‘Hamilton and me’ – actor Giles Terera’s account of the staging of the musical “Hamilton” in London in 2017. He describes rehearsals, staging, lighting, music.. and the fact that before each performance a group of actors put their arms around each other – and prayed to God for ‘strength, safety and joy’. As we meet this Sunday – as we take in the news of the shooting in Keysham – as we read our Bibles and sing our hymns: God offers us strength, safety and joy. Yet again the lectionary reading from John presents us with Jesus saying ‘I am the bread of life’. If we ask ‘what does the bread of life mean’, there is no simple answer – there are many answers, or many layers of answers, and it seems that John’s gospel wants to take our understanding deeper and deeper. Alongside the listeners of Jesus wondering ‘how can Jesus be bread?’, we heard today from the book of Proverbs.  This contains a co...

John 1: 6-8, 19-28 There is a character from the Christmas story who very rarely makes it onto the Christmas cards, although he is the ‘star’ of our Gospel reading today – John the Baptist. So I have provided you all with an image of him to take away today. This is a statue from the Charles bridge in Prague, and in this depiction John is doing what he does best.. wearing animal skins and carrying a scallop shell as a sign of baptism, and he is  pointing.   You’ll find many images of John the Baptist pointing  -         John and Jesus as infant cousins, with John pointing to Jesus; -         John in the desert, pointing to a distant figure pf Jesus coming towards the river for baptism;  -         John baptising Jesus and pointing to him as the Spirit descends in the form of a dove -         Even John standing at the cross, pointin...

  Isaiah 64: 1-7    Mark 13: 24-37 Today is Advent Sunday – a time of hope and expectation and joyfully looking forward to Christmas. But have you been keeping up with the news? Covid continues to claim lives – in the UK, across the world.. and our politicians are trying to work out how best to respond. We long to get life back to normal, to see businesses re-opening, and people meeting and hugging, to be back together physically in our churches. We long for someone to sort this out properly. And who knows what other burdens we are each carrying. Maybe we even pray for God to come and sort it out for us. Our world is really not all that different from the world that Isaiah was writing for in the passage we heard. The book of the Bible we call Isaiah was written by about three different prophets in three different times – towards the end, the part we heard is the third Isaiah – and he is speaking to God’s people at the time when they have returned to Jerusalem after being ...