Rev elations

In Advent we are presented with the great figure of John the Baptist. So humble and so sure of Jesus’ greatness – a short life lived solely to prepare the way for Jesus Christ. As we wait for Christmas this year, in what ways can we truly prepare ourselves?  I’m reminded in this idea of preparation for pregnancy: the nine long months of growing a child within you – with the necessary preparations, practical, emotional, spiritual, medical etc. I remembered thinking one very key thing about being pregnant and that was it took such little effort – unlike other things that I had prepared for in my life - exams, job interviews, ordination - it was my body that grew this child and did the work. I just had to let it. And perhaps God’s relationship with us, could be a little more like this: this sense of gift or grace if we let it be. Because I know that good things require a lot of work and commitment, but I have a sense that God’s love is something we are asked to receive rather tha

This week we saw the General Synod of the Church of England narrowly defeat the measure to allow women to become Bishops. I am fully in favor of the consecration of women as bishops and am thoroughly disappointed and shocked that the measure has been voted out at this late stage; a measure that has been the result of many years of prayer, discussion and compromise. And many people in wider society are asking themselves whether the Church of England has lost credibility and legitimacy because of its failure to introduce this Measure. As the Archbishop said this week: We have, to put it very bluntly, a lot of explaining to do.  Whatever the motivations for voting yesterday, whatever the theological principle on which people acted, spoke; the fact remains that a great deal of this discussion is not intelligible to our wider society. Worse than that, it seems as if we are wilfully blind to some of the trends and priorities of that wider society.  We have some explaining to

Wilfrid Owen’s poetry (see below) introduced me to the reality of war as a student at secondary school, along with Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves these were the writers that helped me see the sacrifice that we ask others to make on our behalf when we send them to fight for us. These writers showed us what they suffered in war, as well as revealing their courage. It is young men and women just like them who today continue to offer their lives for us that we may live in freedom that we honour and respect on this Remembrance Sunday.  All of us have some contact with war today, even if it isn’t with the actual experience of fighting. One experience that stays with me is visiting the S21 prison in Cambodia and seeing the remnants of the appalling Pol Pot regime. It was an experience similar perhaps to those who visit Auschwitz, a chilling and frightening one to witness to the remnant and memory of what people do to one another in war. The element that I found so scary a

Another Angle on the Book of Job Of course, the story of Job is very familiar, at least in terms of its basic parts. The Book of Job is usually considered as a book about the ultimate question: why do we suffer? [See below!] What I want to explore in this blog post is, how the story presents to us what happens when we are confronted with the limitations of our world-view and how a conceptual mind-shift can occur. Most of us have a certain way of thinking about the world, about how things work – and we interpret our day to day experiences with reference to our wider concept of ‘how the world works’. For Christians and other believers, God takes a central place in that appreciation of ‘how the world works’. Who we think God is; what we think God is like, will inform our world-view, and our actions. Well, one centrally important thing that the narrative of Job shows us is what happens to a man or any person when their worldview is demolished by something that happens to

The Book of Job  ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked shall I return, the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’.  ‘Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes.’ ‘ Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?’ Job is a righteous man who is visited with tragedy and suffering: the death of all his children and an illness which sees him infected with painful sores all over his body. His suffering and whether God is just is the subject of the Book of Job in the Old Testament. If we suffer even when we are righteous and follow the law, is God therefore unjust? For the writers of this book, suffering cannot be seen as visited upon Job as punishment for a secret sin he is not aware of – his three friends that come to lament with him, but then accuse him of wrongdoing are shown to be in error. The book

Rev 12.7-12   Michael Defeats the Dragon   And war broke out in heaven ; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.  Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming, ‘Now have come the salvation and the power    and the kingdom of our God    and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down,    who accuses them day and night before our God. But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb    and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death. Rejoice then, you heavens    and those who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea,    for the devil has

http://www.salisbury.anglican.org/ministry/publications A series of reflections, mainly from ordained women in the Diocese, ahead of the General Synod vote on legislation for Women Bishops in July 2012.

Sermon 2 nd September 2012 This month of September in church we will be looking closely at the Letter of James. This letter takes us into the heart of the faith versus works debate. It was a hotly contested letter, especially in the Reformation period; Luther wanted it removed from the Canon as he thought it undermined his belief in justification by faith alone. How can the Letter be of use to us today? The Letter of James helps us to see clearly the importance of that inter-relationship between faith and action. For the writer, no-one can be religious; can be a person of faith, unless they show that by what they do. It goes right to the heart of how we understand ethics as Christians. What sort of people should we be if we declare faith in the Bible, in the Son of God; what sort of things should we do? Well, for the writer it is clear, we should be humble, generous, kind and gentle, compassionate, carers for those who are vulnerable. We should not be proud, lovers

Sunday 19 th August, 2012 John 6.51-58 Jesus said to the Jews:   ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh’. The passages that John’s Gospel contain about Jesus as the bread of life are pretty radical and would have really shocked his Jewish listeners. The early Christians were thought of as cannibals because of the fact that they met together and ate the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The story of the Last Supper and Jesus’ commandment to his disciples to remember him when eating and drinking, along with these passages from John (that we have been following in the lectionary) lay the foundation for the Church’s worship and in particular for the tradition of meeting together and eating together to remember Jesus. This is of course what we do in a more formal way in our church, week by week. We come together and remember Jesus’ words at the

 Just under two weeks ago Bishop Richard re-dedicated St Mark's Church and we are starting the journey of getting used again to being one parish with two operating churches. It's good for me to make the walk into Surbiton and up the hill to St Mark's. I feel I am re-connecting with a part of the parish that I don't so regularly walk in and I think that is a very good thing. St Mark's end of the parish has a very different feel to St Andrew's; it's easy to forget when you are in the idyllic Maple Road setting that there is a busy Surbiton with a stream of commuters flooding to and from the train station every day. Just spending a little time in St Mark's I remember that it has a large footfall, people really do drop into pray there and that is a challenge for us as a community to consider whether we can keep the church open for that purpose. I remember the first time that I went to Greenbelt and a parish priest from Liverpool was talking about his

The reign of God is like........................   The kingdom of God might be better described as ‘The reign of God’- reign relates to the idea of the rule of God, rather than just the area of his dominion.  The reign of God is something we can relate to, but also something a little bit surprising, there is an element of the unexpected. That’s why Jesus uses so many parables to describe the reign of God. Parables are stories that use similes; something that is like the thing that is being described, but is also different from it.  The parables that Jesus uses to explain the reign of God in Mark’s passage today (Sunday 17th June 2012, Mark 4.26-34)  relate to the agricultural world of Jesus’ listeners. In the first we are told the story of the seed that is scattered and neglected but brings forth a great harvest. In the second we are told the story of the tiny seed of the mustard tree that grows into a large shrub where birds nest (see end of text for Bible

The Sacrifice of Separation Reflection on the Sunday after Ascension 2012 Unity within Christian understanding is a positive quality and ideal; we strive for unity and union with Christ and with one another as the body of Christ in the world. Separation is perhaps a more complicated and difficult idea. Separation might traditionally be seen as sin, for we are separated from God due to sin. Sin is death and means ultimately separation from life. Human separations are often difficult: divorce, loss of loved ones through death, people being parted by war, poverty, for economic reasons and so on. Separation therefore more often than not involves some kind of loss and accompanying pain. Personally speaking, this week I’ve been going through my own small separation from my children as I’ve got back to work and it’s not easy to separate from people we love or we care for. Think of the challenges for this parish of having two separate churches, challenges for our sense of unity and c