Sunday's coming!

Church anniversary     Matthew 13: 24-30   I read a few weeks ago about a theological tutor who used to ask his students “What is the biggest problem facing the churches today?”. They would talk about increasing secularism, growing crime rates, the apathy caused by materialism… and then he would tell them “the biggest problem for the churches today is coping with the overwhelming abundance of God”.   In the same way, as we look back over 165 years of witness in this chapel, I think our biggest problem is not an ageing population, or Christian disunity, or rival activities on Sunday morning – I think our biggest problem is trying to work out how on earth we can show people the overwhelming abundance of God – the ridiculously huge measure of grace and patience and love that Jesus shows us exists at the heart of God. And I think that reading this parable shows us just how amazing God is.   At first hearing, we might think this is a very straightforward parable from Jesus. Even in the fine

Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30  Psalm 145: 8-14   On Tuesday this week we had the first of our monthly Landsker Pastorate Bible & Prayer meetings (on zoom). Six of us met to look at the passage we’ve heard from Matthew and to ask what the passage meant to us, what questions we had, and how our prayers might be shaped by it.   As we listened to these words from Jesus questioning how the people of his time saw him, what their opinions were of him, how they received him – we found ourselves asking how we are seen, as followers of Jesus.  What does it mean to be a Christian – and on the contrary, how do we see those who are non-Christians? We could all think of examples of people who were very good people, but who would not call themselves Christians, and who did not see any need to come into a chapel or a church. I’ve been wrestling with this question “what does it really mean to be a Christian?” ever since.     One way to work out what “the world at large” thinks about something is to type

Genesis 22: 1-14       Matthew 10: 40-42 Isidor Rabi, who was born in Austria in 1898, moved to the United States as a child and won the Nobel prize for physics in 1944. He was once asked by an admiring friend, “Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in your neighbourhood?” Rabi responded: “My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: ‘So? Did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. ‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’ That difference – asking good questions – made me a scientist.” I think we could say that living in a relationship with God – which for us means following Jesus Christ – is based on the same principle. Did you ask a good question today? What might our ‘good questions’ be as we read the scriptures today? Let’s look closely at the story of Abraham, bei