Rev elations

Belonging A new kind of kinship Isaiah 49:1-7 1 Corinthians 1: 1-9 John 1:29-42 I wonder if you can reflect for a moment on the number of different ways that you ‘belong’. For instance, to a family, to a club, a political society, a nation, a religion. In what ways is your belonging constructed? It might be through birth, through shared interests, through a shared ideology, through how you look, through where you live or through choice. Which groups or identities are most important to you? Are they the ones you have specifically chosen or the ones that have simply been given to you? St John’s presentation of the early part of Jesus’ ministry encourages us to see membership of his kingdom as an open ended and free invitation to, ‘come and see’. There is, seemingly, no anxiety for Jesus in whom he addressees his invitation to; indeed, as Jesus’ ministry progresses he appears to deliberately disrupt the normal expectations of who is and who isn’t in the club. As he redr...

Epiphany Sunday 8 th January 2017 Matthew 2:1-12 Ephesians 3:1-12 Psalm 72 Epiphany is a festival which encourages us to notice the mystery of the presence of God in our lives. St Paul uses the word mystery a number of times in relation to Jesus Christ in the 3 rd chapter of his letter to the Ephesians. Jesus’ presence as mystery means that as humans we cannot define, limit or control who and what God is  – rather, we are asked to notice Jesus and his continuing presence in the world, through the grace of God which grants us faith. In noticing God, or at least trying to, we are guided in our understanding which is properly expressed as devotion and praise. The nativity stories encourage us to worship God through depicting a miraculous birth.  Consistent with St Paul’s mission to the Gentiles – the non-Jews – the nativity story describes to us how the Christ-child and therefore the mystery of God, is not exclusive. Rather, the Christ-child is to be worshippe...

Advent reminds us that an essential part of being human is our ability to long and to hope for change. The Old Testament writers harness the ability to long for things with great skill, the Israelite history is a history of a people turning longing and desire into a religion: think of the Promised Land and the Messiah. In Advent – the season of expectant waiting - we are given the opportunity to hone our skills of describing the things that we long for, the things that we expect and hope God to provide. However, I wonder how convincingly Christian voices in our culture manage to articulate a vision of God. When we contrast that with our culture, we notice one that is fantastically good at harnessing the language of desire and longing to sell things and lifestyles. For example, we will be told: salvation is to be found in this model of a car; that this perfume will give you a glamorous life-style; that only if you buy this new and better model will you be fulfilled – that, in summary, ...

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...