Rev elations

'No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.'                                                                         Luke 16: 12-13 Just imagine what it means to have wealth as our Master. As our Master what does wealth require of us? It requires us to serve it, to put it first, to depend upon it, to see its way as the primary way in the world: to see it as the ultimate good. And wealth is not just possessions but also power. It is alluring. Can we make decisions that are free of the fear from pover...

Sabbath  How does God teach us to live well? What is the relationship of Christianity to Jewish law? These two questions come up continually in Scripture as Christianity is a religion in strong relationship to Judaism and in dialogue with it. Following God’s commandments and being faithful to God is always tied in Jewish scripture to well being. If you follow the law: feed the hungry, care for the afflicted, stop speaking evil, then: ‘you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail’. Jesus’ frustration with members of the Jewish religious elite is that they focus on custom and ritual and ignore the reason for the law – the well being of God’s people. Jesus says to the leader of the synagogue, 'but you will let your animals have water on the Sabbath and yet you will deny this woman healing on the Sabbath? You hypocrites!' The Sabbath is meant to bring life, to enable the Jewish people to focus on God’s law so that a socie...

As part of the service last Sunday (28 th July 2013) we looked at Jesus’ teaching on how to pray (Luke 11:11-13 and Matthew 6: 9-13). In so doing, I asked congregation members to re-write the Our Father to explore its nature more fully. Once you start, you realise how hard it is! How will you name God; how will you express your desire for the world to be a better place; how do you understand the offer of forgiveness and God’s command that we forgive in turn?  At the end of the prayers reproduced below is an analysis of the structure of the Lord's Prayer to help you write your own. Matthew 6:9-13 “This, then, is how you should pray: “‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,   your kingdom come, your will be done,      on earth as it is in heaven.   Give us today our daily bread.   And forgive us our debts,      as we also have forgiven our debtors.   And lead us not into temptation,  ...

The Archbishop’s embarrassment concerning the Church Commissioner’s investment indirectly in Wonga helps to clarify ideas about sin, purity and holiness. In particular it reveals the extent to which sin is communal and interconnected. The Archbishop talks about a complex world which we all have to live in. He is right, but it can be put more theologically than that. The in-depth discussion around the Charity Commissioner’s investment portfolio and its tolerance of say up to 3% in companies (perhaps a hotel chain) that sell pornography reveals the way in which it is probably impossible to exist in perfect holy isolation. Nobody is perfect in and of themselves because we exist inter-dependently of one another. That is why sin is so corrupting - the wide effect of the pornographic industry not just on those who make it and buy it can be charted. That is why, when God made Himself known to the Jewish people as YHWH, that he started a covenantal relationship not just with a few individuals ...

Imagine that someone has sat you down, perhaps a new friend, and says so ‘tell me your life story’. Where do you start and what do you say? What can you share; what do you want to share? How do you present yourself to another, do you re-write yourself as a hero , or perhaps a victim :   is your life a comedy or a tragedy , or is it too boring so that you need to invent some better details? Are you afraid that you will be judged or are you ashamed of details in your past? Perhaps not, perhaps your story is an acceptable one , one that lives up to so called societal expectations. Well, have a think about your life-story so far. The demoniac (one possessed by many demons) in Luke’s Gospel 8:26-39 has cause to cast himself as a victim. His identity obliterated by his occupiers, outcast, living in the tombs, chained up for his own safety, naked and self-harming. When Jesus meets this man he can’t even address him personally, it is the demons he has to speak to. This extreme examp...

How does a feminist married to a stay-at home Dad relate to Father’s Day? What does being a Father mean in contemporary society and what can the Christian God, who we so regularly address as Father, tell us about Fathering? This is a difficult and complex subject to approach for so many reasons. Human fathers leave, abuse, die, love, hate, nurture and encourage their children. None of us has a neutral relationship to the concept of fatherhood and our own particular experiences of our own fathers, or their absence will have had a deep impact on our lives. Think about your own relationship to the concept of fathering, based on your own personal experiences. What would an ideal Father be like? Are there memories of hurt and failure that you can ask God to heal, today? Perhaps you are a Father who is struggling to live up to that ideal? God meets each of us in the middle of our messy and difficult lives and gives us that stability and continuing presence that no earthly Fat...

I was on retreat last week and I was powerfully reminded of our human tendency to be called away from the most important things in life, by mundane and unimportant things. The best illustration of this is predictably our fascination with technology. The mobile phone ring, the beep when you get a text message, email, notification…….   And that instant desire to respond, to look, and to see what you are being called to. It can by its noisy insistence - that it is the most important thing in our life- call us way from proper priorities. Then on retreat I was presented with a disciplined community that had at its centre the call of God; and for them it was the bell that called them to prayer. That bell ‘re-called’ them consistently through the day back, always back, to their essential reliance upon God. It made me realise that I let too many distractions call me away from God. When I got back from retreat there was a small miracle that brought this all together. Th...