Rev elations

Lent is a really good time to consider spiritual practices of silence and of renunciation. Fasting and silence help us to understand Jesus’ experience in the desert or wilderness. We think of Jesus in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights as a metaphor for our own need to strip away in our life unnecessary distractions. Desert spirituality is about raw encounter, with ourselves and ultimately we hope with God. Sara Maitland writes in A Book of Silence about her own journey into silence as a modern day, somewhat alternative hermit. In one particular chapter Sara describes some time she spent in the Sinai Desert and this leads her into some specific insights. In an engaging paragraph she writes: I started to think that perhaps silence is God. Perhaps God is silence – the shining, spinning ring of ‘pure endless light’. Perhaps God speaking is a ‘verb’, an act, but God in perfect self-communication in love with the Trinity, is silence and therefore is silence. God is silen...

It’s been a week for me of thinking about money. It has of course for the nation as well as we listened to the detail of the Chancellor’s budget. How much money we have got, how we get it and how we spend it are questions that every household has to ask; every business and charity too. The questions are the same for the nation, if on a much larger scale. This week in my church we have been looking closely at our finances and the resources available to us. It has been challenging, making all of us vulnerable. For questions of finance and money get right to the heart of things. They ask us to seriously reflect upon what is important and who is important. In so doing they reveal our deepest values. Jesus taught unequivocally that we cannot serve two masters – we can serve either God or wealth. Yet I suppose the temptation is to think that we can divide our loyalties. We can blur the line and keep our feet in both camps. I was inspired to read this week about the Sikh t...

I wonder if you can imagine yourself in your daily life. What do you do Monday to Friday? - work at a check out, in a factory, teaching students, cooking the dinner, shopping, gardening, reading a book? Imagine that into your domestic or work space Jesus appears - Jesus is there just a few metres away and he’s calling you ‘Follow me’.   Imagine Mary before she was surprised by the annunciation, what was she doing? Imagine Joseph as Mary came to talk to him to tell him the news, what was he doing; imagine the inn keeper who opened the door; imagine the shepherds as they were out on the fields tending their sheep; imagine the wise men before they saw the star. They all had a ‘normal’ before something strange and mysterious happened to them. And they are judged on how they respond to that mystery and that invitation. -‘be it unto me according to your word’ These narratives tell us, as the incarnation reveals to us, that Jesus/God appears in our normal ordinary world. Jes...

In one of the most extraordinary poems (in the sense that it reveals to me a new way of seeing things), in the ‘Haphazard by Starlight’ collection (Janet Morley)  Denise Levertov reflects on the idea of Jesus as the Lamb of God (see her Agnus Dei). In it she explores the characteristics of a lamb, and by so doing –edges us to the discovery of our own significance in the story of God. For a lamb is unintelligent, weak, dependent – he relies on us ‘cold hearts’ to give him sustenance: -is it implied(?) she writes that ‘we’ must ‘hold to our icy hearts’ a ‘shivering God’? It’s a surprising and enlightening reflection as it turns on its head the concept or idea of God as omnipotent and all-sustaining, suggesting rather, that God depends on us for our love, kindness and mercy – that indeed our ability to nurture God has a real impact on God’s ability to be found and to excel. This sort of discovery relies on Christians being mature grown up ones, who do not suppose that God wil...

One of the issues that the terror attacks in France urge us to reflect on is the ever present threat of hatred and violence. We can align hatred and violence to any number of religious or political ideologies, but the banality of hatred and cold murder comes from the human heart for any number of reasons. It happens in homes and between friends as well as between strangers and supposed enemies. Certitude - moral, political or religious gives power. It enables one to live under the delusion that our supposed version of truth gives us the right to hate and at the worst to take away life. Such certitude gives confidence as it feeds hatred and violence. Of course religious outrage - defending God - gives the greatest veneer of righteous anger that anyone could manufacture. The argument goes: You have offended my highest beliefs, literally my God, so I have the right to hurt you. It is a perversion of religious truth and the exact opposite of the real aims of any religion – love God and y...

Text version- Hello from St Andrew’s Church in Rugby , where once again I’m surrounded by Christmas trees. This year there are a couple that pick up the WW1 remembrance theme using poppies as decorations. 2014 has been a significant year for the UK and for Europe as we’ve reflected on the significance of the first and the second world wars. The not uncontroversial Sainsbury’s advert reminded the nation that the story of Christmas can do extraordinary things; even in war it can unite enemies, as in the famous Christmas Day truce in 1914. At Christmas we do enter a mystical moment, a moment of opportunity, where the message of God’s love and care for each one of us comes really close. The vulnerable child, the nativity scenes, the bringing of gifts, they tell us that we can still believe in the power of love to transform human experience. At Christmas 1914 on the Western front, some soldiers dared to look their enemies in the face and wish them happy Christmas. In our soci...

We all have experiences of the announcement of pregnancies: ‘Mum I’m pregnant’; ‘we’re having a baby’, or in our case a step further on the sonographer saying, ‘one head and another head’….. But, the simple announcement is not often straightforward; human lives and relationships are complex and fraught with difficulty as well as with joy and frustration and even tragedy. We all have knowledge of the complications too; for some the inability to have children, or a miscarriage, the loss of children; for others the joy and challenge of adoption or fostering children. Bringing children into the world, let alone bringing them up, is an exercise in experiencing the pains, sufferings, joy and delight of God’s relationship with his people. It should perhaps be no surprise to us that at the heart of the story of God’s relationship with us, his people, is the announcement of a birth. For there is no greater metaphor, no more complex and demanding role, no more poignant or dangerous mome...