Rev elations

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...

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 thin...

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...

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...