Rev elations

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.   ...

I was quite struck by the man who took a photo (wrongly labelled at first a selfie) of himself a nd the hijacker of a plane, which turned out to be an instance of some love affair gone seriously awry. It got me thinking about personal identity and our modern ability to record and diary everything in the minutest detail. Does such an ability to photograph, record and write the details of our lives mean that there is nothing left to hide, nothing left to learn, everything laid bare? What will historians make of our time and culture; will they understand everything, or does the profusion of information, detail and self-disclosure obscure reality? Or to put it another way:- Would the disciples have taken a selfie with Jesus on the beach? If so, would that photo have proved for all time that Jesus was resurrected? I have a sense that the resurrected Jesus couldn’t be recognised in a photo from the past, even if we did have such a photo.  And I sense this because recognising...

When my mum was in her 20's she nearly died of a brain  haemorrhage . She tells me that her parents prayed that if her life was saved they would give her to God. This sort of bargaining with God at times of crisis is common to all of us and the story of Hannah and Samuel is a similar story – Hannah bargains with God: ‘if you open my womb, I’ll return the gift back to you’ – and she fulfills that vow; she brings her weaned child to the temple to give him as a Nazirite to the Lord. (a Narzirite is set apart, they can drink nothing made from grapes, they can't cut their hair and they must avoid corpses).  I suppose both these stories encourage us to reflect deeply on the nature of God’s relationship with us – can God really be influenced by the prayers and bargaining of God’s people? Can humans given anything to God and if so what? What are the implications of our answers to these questions? Answering these questions necessarily brings us up sharp against the gap be...

The Presentation of the Christ-child in the Temple Within the Christian tradition we do a lot of looking – we look at Jesus all the time – we tell the stories about his life, we enact out the dramas of his birth, adult ministry, death and resurrection; and today’s story is about Jesus being looked at again – presented in the temple, taken, blessed and recognised as the light of the world. Looking at Jesus is a vital part of Christian life – we learn everything from him, but the gaze is not one way – Jesus also looks back at us. Timothy Radcliffe writes that Joy begins by letting ourselves be looked at by Jesus ( What’s the point of being a Christian?) Jesus knows intimately about the ways in which humans look at one another – being a part of our world he was exposed to the range of human emotions – he was looked at with love, with gratitude, with fear, with hope, with mercy, with compassion, with hatred, with judgment and with condemnation. On the Cross he was naked and...

They came bearing gifts, Gifts of numinous tone, Less than £30 a week And there they came With gold crosses and chains, Calendars, clothes and keepsakes. They spread them out around the room Across the tables and chairs They hung them on the walls As they prepared food and drink Blew balloons and laid out flowers. A feast prepared A celebration To remember Their frequent steps Across thresholds Into life

This summer, I took part in the week of guided prayer, which we organised here at St Andrew’s. 2 priests from another diocese came to be with us for a week and each participant committed to praying for half an hour a day as well as meeting their guides for half an hour each day. We were encouraged to pray with scripture, to choose our own passages, or to be given one from our guide. I prayed with the story of the woman at the well. Almost immediately at the beginning of that week I was presented with an image, in prayer, of a plant in the desert that had completely dried up. In my imagination the roots of this plant desired to grow towards the oasis to be fed – they were desperate for water. For me this powerful image perfectly summed up how I felt inside, the state of my spiritual life. I felt that my spirit was drained, that it was literally dying of thirst – I urgently needed my spirit to be renewed with the life-giving water which comes from God: God was there and ready to give me...

God is rejected, forgotten, ignored, blamed and abused; the same can be said, oftentimes, for his followers. Our job as Christians is to call people to worship the living God and therefore to honour and glorify the one to whom all honour and glory is due. At Christmas we have a particular opportunity to divert people’s attention away from what is of fleeting value, to what is of eternal value. Contrary to popular thought, people are hungry to be fed and eager to pray and those of us who have seen the living God must share in the joy of pointing the way to others. We do not control or contain the glory of God; we do not know where he is or isn’t at work; but we do know what we comprehend together as faithful Christians and to that we must be true. Being a Christian has never been simple – there is no golden age of Christianity when everyone believed and everyone went to church. Faith is a narrow road and only a few walk it – but nonetheless, at the same time, there are always those who...