Rev elations

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...

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...