Rev elations

Advent reminds us that an essential part of being human is our ability to long and to hope for change. The Old Testament writers harness the ability to long for things with great skill, the Israelite history is a history of a people turning longing and desire into a religion: think of the Promised Land and the Messiah. In Advent – the season of expectant waiting - we are given the opportunity to hone our skills of describing the things that we long for, the things that we expect and hope God to provide. However, I wonder how convincingly Christian voices in our culture manage to articulate a vision of God. When we contrast that with our culture, we notice one that is fantastically good at harnessing the language of desire and longing to sell things and lifestyles. For example, we will be told: salvation is to be found in this model of a car; that this perfume will give you a glamorous life-style; that only if you buy this new and better model will you be fulfilled – that, in summary,

We begin where we end and end where we begin. We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.   Little Gidding, The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot We worship a King who wears a crown of thorns.  The liturgical year is circular – and our spiritual experience of time must then in some way be circular too. We see this as we come to the end of our liturgical year – the feast of Christ the King- knowing that we are about to embark on the season of expectation and nativity, and yet, approach it with the crucifixion narrative. Today, in order to understand who Christ is and what God is like we have to re-encounter the crucifixion. We are invited, in particular, to see where we are in relation to Jesus. It’s easy to stand adoring around the crib of a child of hope and expectation, less easy to keep on standing when he hangs on a tree, in blood and sweat and close to death. Yet, w

Justice (Jeremiah 31:27-34, Luke 18:1-8) Justice is one of the great themes of the Old Testament and remains a key theme in human experience. We all hate, on a personal level, to be dealt with in a way that seems unfair; we are alert to the minor injustices that we suffer: ‘That person got served first at the bar, but I’ve been waiting longer’, for instance. But, justice is concerned with more than minor instances of unfairness. On a communal level we rely and depend upon a criminal justice system that we hope and expect to deliver justice – but we know that it too is a fallible, human system. The long and arduous fight of the people of Liverpool to secure justice for the Hillsborough victims makes us deeply aware of the forces that seek to prevent, or delay justice being done. The Judge in our New Testament reading denied and delayed justice to the widow simply out of laziness. Only when it became more effort to deny justice than to give it, did he change his behaviour. J

This week one of my congregation members invited me to their place of work. It is not an invitation I get very often, but one that I will certainly be encouraging from others! Most people probably wonder what a Vicar gets up to all week, we are regularly greeted with the familiar: ‘but don’t you only work on Sunday’s’ jest – but I suppose that for most of us the working life of other people is pretty much a mystery. Perhaps you can reflect on your own working life experience for a moment – where has it taken you and what have your learnt? The person I visited happened to work in engineering and he took me around the factory floor, meeting the people who worked there and showing me the things they were making. As someone with a mind completely unsuited to anything practical, I was amazed and awed at the things that other people can do. It got me thinking about the way in which most of us have, in relative terms, quite a small frame of reference: we go to the same shops, the sam

Lazarus at the Gate (Luke 16:19-31, see below) ·         What motivates you and I to act in a Christian way towards our fellow humans? ·         Which persistent excuses do we use to avoid doing the things that we know we should? The story of Lazarus and the rich man at the gate is crude to a certain degree, but its crudeness is intended to cut through our sophisticated reasons for avoiding acting with mercy, generosity and compassion. So, one of the things that this story asks of us is to look quite starkly at our own reasons for avoiding doing the things that we know we should be doing. Which neighbours whose suffering we are well aware of are we avoiding? In what ways are we trying to get out of our obligations to our fellow humans? Which reasons and excuses do we most often use? But the other thing that the story does, which is more complicated, is to analyse our motivations for doing the right thing. In the past of course the threat of eternal damnation was much mor

Last week we were thinking about how to place our lives, both individual and communal, before God. For this reason we thought through the importance of the practice of seeking His presence in all of our experiences , both good and bad. I encouraged us all to ask: ‘where is God in this?’. This week, I would like us to reflect upon a different question together, and that is: ‘Who am I before God?’ One of the primary lessons we learn from Scripture, right from the beginning, is the ‘jealous’ nature of our God – he looks at us with pride and it seems a sense of ownership: you are mine. Yahweh of the OT is angry when the people turn to other Gods; the covenant that he has made with them requires faithfulness and constancy. In our passage from Luke (14:25-33) we hear Jesus talking in a different way about the sort of faithfulness that his Father in Heaven requires of his followers. Jesus talks about hating father and mother, wife and child and he does so in the context of a few

I would like you to reflect for a moment on how you respond when something bad happens, or things generally are not going so well for you. What is your reaction? Perhaps you blame yourself, thinking: ‘Have I done something wrong’ or ‘Am I at fault somehow’. Or perhaps you blame somebody else, or the circumstances.  We may wish to reflect how we respond as a nation to things going badly as well. Do we blame, self-examine, change our ways? I’d like us to put our response alongside that of the prophets of the Old Testament. They ask, when things go badly: ‘Have we been unfaithful to God/Yahweh’. The first thing to note is that the prophets are thinking collectively ( of the whole community of the faithful that is ) and they are thinking theologically ( is this somehow related to our covenant with God ). The prophets ensure, then, that their collective experiences are understood theologically. They want to know how their experience relates to their God, to His promises to them, to

Addressed to the people of St Andrew's Church, Rugby: I would like to start with what will sound like a random question:  I wonder who we would be together if, for one reason or another, we were not able to worship in this building, in the centre of town? How, if at all, would our identity change? The Sabbath was and is something incredibly significant for Jewish communal self-identity; it marks them out as different. It gives them a weekly reminder that they live not for themselves, but for the God who made them. It is more than attending worship on Sunday – it is about a rhythm of life which resists the domination of work over rest and limits the human drive to create, make, accumulate, sell and work. Additionally it protects people from those with power over them to force them to work with no rest, for the whole household, livestock and alien must rest too. This is not a limited vision of rest, but a holistic vision of rest for the whole of created order. Let us

The outcome of the in/out referendum is an enormous political shock that is reverberating around the world – voting trends give a picture of a divided Britain : divided between those who are cosmopolitan and those who are traditional; between the young and the old; between cities and countryside; between the wealthy and the poor; between Scotland/Nr Ireland  and England/Wales. Such a huge political decision which ends a 46 year political union, which has toppled a Prime Minister and shocked the political classes, leaves us to wonder at the disconnect between those who lead and those whom they lead. For those who are elated and delighted at the outcome the narrative of victory is one that tells of: freedom from out of touch elites who rule from Westminster and Brussels; power to take back control of our borders; power to change our country for the better For those who are despairing at the outcome there is shock, anger and disorientation – the United Kingdom they thought they b

This weekend our nation and commonwealth gathers to give thanks for the long life and ministry of Queen Elizabeth II as we celebrate her 90 th year. We know that she still leads a remarkably full working life and we may well reflect today on how she has managed to thrive so long in such a demanding and public role. This week I’ve been on a conference and one of the subject areas was ‘building resilience for leadership’. We could easily have used Her Majesty as a shining example of someone who has displayed a remarkable resilience in leadership; not only is she the longest serving monarch in British history, but also the world’s oldest ruling monarch; and of course during those years there have been trials and challenges. But what is resilience? It includes the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; a certain toughness and clarity of vision and role. Our Queen remains remarkably steadfast and committed to her task. But, resilience is more than its formal definition sug

Perhaps we could enter imaginatively into the face of God and more importantly into how God looks at us. It might not be easy to conjure up such an image; God’s face being hidden to us, but, what about his regard? How do we imagine him looking at us? The passages that we’ve looking at for Sunday 5th June from 1 Kings (17:17-end) and from Luke (7:11-17) reveal to us that God looks with compassion on his children, especially those who suffer, mourn and who are the least and most vulnerable in society, as women were. Elijah and Jesus are shown to have deep compassion on the two widows that they meet. They raise their sons from the dead; they act out of their very real compassion.                                                                           Compassion can be costly, compassion asks that we take responsibility for another’s suffering – not just saying a few kind words, but stepping into their world and changing it for them and with them. Think of the Good Sama

This week is being marked out by the Archbishops of   York   and   Canterbury   as a week of prayer in our nation, that ‘thy kingdom come’. At St Andrew’s we have been looking at the Lord’s Prayer and we have been having a go at writing our own version.  Below are some other resources to help you pray this week. Christ Has No Body Christ has no body now, but yours. No hands, no feet on earth, but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks With compassion on this world.   Teresa of   Avila Come, Holy Spirit: Come among us, come upon us. Come, Spirit of Truth – enlighten our minds; Come, Spirit of Love – enlarge our hearts; Come, Holy Comforter – strengthen and heal us; Come, Holy Fire – enflame and purify us; Come, Breath of Life – inspire us in our witness: that all may be drawn to know you and to praise you One God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. Fruits of the Spirit Galatians 5:22-23 1.         Love 2.         Joy 3.         Peace 4