Sunday's coming!

  Proper 26    Luke 21: 5-19   I came across an article this week entitled “What is wrong with the world?”. It gave a few suggestions: -        Tribalism – the sort of nationalism which oppresses others -        The lack of a common vision for good -        Inequality of wealth and resources – which leads to envy and hatred -        Lack of love for people who are ‘not like us’.   I know that the same author has written, too, about the importance for the world of forgiveness, faith in God and love for the widest possible definition of family.   He’s also written one of the hymns in our hymnbook – "O God of earth & altar" – it’s GK Chesterton, author of the Father Brown stories, and a convert to Catholicism. His article ‘what is wrong with the world?’ was written in 1910.   It feels as though there is ...

  Reading one: Luke 6: 20-31 Talk 1 You don’t need me to tell you it’s a difficult time of the year – as the evenings get dark ever more quickly, the weather gets more wintry, and as we face news of the death of loved ones, and our diaries seem to fill up with funerals.   In all that gloom, All Saints Day (which was yesterday) and All Soul’s Day (which is today) shine like a beacon of hope.   We might sometimes feel that saints are people we put on a pedestal, to be looked up to and admired. The sort of people – whether official saints or people we admired – who make us say “we could never be like that”. They were blessed, they were a blessing to us, and when we sing the hymn ‘For all the saints” we sing with real feeling the line   “we feebly struggle, they in glory shine..”.   An extraordinary example is of one of the most recent and youngest saints – St Carlo Acutis: an English-born Italian Catholic who died of leukaemia in 2006, at the age of 1...

Luke 18: 9-14    Susan is not with us today because she is at the World Council of Churches 6 th World conference on Faith and Order, in Egypt. Their theme is “Where now for visible unity?” – reflecting one the 1700 th anniversary of the council of Nicaea (of course) and the purpose of the World Council of Churches “to call one another to visible unity”.   You might well think that we could all do with a little more unity in our polarised world – between churches of course, but between all people who find themselves, or make themselves, divided. This week we have had the Caerphilly by-election for the Senedd – causing division as any election tends to do – and so much of the world news shows us conflict between people and reflects the sort of division which so easily leads to hatred of the other.   In our divided world, how are those who follow Jesus Christ supposed to live?   One simple answer is – following Jesus’ teachings. ...

  
 Psalm 121 
 Luke 18:1-8 Oh Lord hear my prayer… When I call, answer me O Lord hear my prayer… Come and listen to me.   It is only natural sometimes in our lives to feel that we need answers in our prayers. We call, we wail, we weep, and we wonder if anyone is actually listening.   Perhaps as you were meant to be listening to our Bible readings you were finding it hard to concentrate. Perhaps you’ve been worrying about a member of the family – an elderly relative with health problems, or a younger one in financial difficulty; perhaps you’re worried about your own health, or fearful of the future in some other way.   Perhaps you’ve confided in someone else or maybe you’re the only one who knows what it is that you’re bothered about. With all this potential for distraction going on in our minds and in our lives, how are we meant to quieten our own voices for a moment and listen to the Bible?   I hope some of us found Psalm 121 helpful “I lif...

  This week I am going "off lectionary" and exploring harvest through Psalm 8 and Mark 10: 13-16     However many harvest festivals we have celebrated in our lives, I hope we never lose a sense of how amazing and beautiful our world is. I love to see and smell all the wonders of harvest-time: the decoration of a chapel at harvest festival, the harvested fields around us, the trees laden with fruit, and the gathering of people to celebrate.   If you need a bit more wonder in your life – I want to share with you a bit of the story of the golden mole, which I heard about on Radio 4 this week, on a short programme called ‘a carnival of animals’.   Golden moles are found in sub-Saharan Africa, so we don’t need to worry about them digging up Pembrokeshire! Their kidneys are so efficient that many species never need to drink water. Their hearing is so sensitive that they can detect the vibrations of insects moving above them, and distinguish between the ones th...