Mark 16:1-8 1 Corinthians 15:51-55 There are no Easter bonnets or bunnies in Mark’s story. How strange, and thin it is compared to the other three gospel accounts. There’s the empty tomb, the young man’s message that Jesus is risen, the command to tell the disciples that he’s gone ahead to Galilee, and the promise…
Luke 24:1-12 1 Corinthians 15:17-26 ‘These words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.’ Why not? Why were the eleven disciples and the others so incredulous? Perhaps because those who brought the news were all women: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and others. Resurrection, if it happens,…
Luke 23:32-38 When the European missionaries came to Alberta, Canada, they were savagely opposed by many of the indigenous peoples. Among them was a young chief of the Cree named Maskepetoon. Eventually he responded to the missionary’s work, and became a Christian. Shortly afterwards, a member of the Blackfoot tribe killed his father. Maskepetoon rode…
John 12:12-36 It was Mark Twain who said, “let us endeavour so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry”. Some of you may know that Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, long before he established the Nobel Peace Prize. What led him to establish the prize was something that happened…
Luke 14:25-35 Imagine a politician standing on a soap-box addressing a crowd. ‘If you’re going to vote for me,’ he says, ‘you’re voting to lose your homes and families; you’re asking for higher taxes and lower wages; you’re deciding in favour of losing all you love best! So come on – who’s on my side?’…
John 21:15-19 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 Today is Passion Sunday – nothing to do with sex as the council officials in Oxford mistakenly thought a few years ago when attempting to licence as passion play – but the point in Lent when we turn from the more general themes, to thinking more directly about the cross….
Mark 9:33-37 Mark 10:35-44 Philippians 2:1-11 If you want a sure fire way to wind up certain sections of the population, all you need do is refer to today as Mother’s Day, and a many of us start foaming at the mouth and turning purple as we insist that there’s no such thing and it…
Luke 12:22-31 Don’t let worry kill you, let the church help, the poster said. Don’t worry about your kidney stone, said the poster in the doctor’s surgery, it’ll pass. For several years a woman had been having trouble getting to sleep at night because she feared burglars. One night her husband heard a noise in…
Matthew 4:1-11 I Corinthians 9:24-27 If you think our Church Meeting is ever just a little bit boring, we could always go back to how it used to be. In the seventeenth and eighteenth, and into the nineteenth, centuries, the main role of a Church Meeting was to exercise discipline over the members, with people…
Luke 13:22-30 I wonder if you remember Roald dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, in which the story had an unexpected ending. I remember one, where an unscrupulous antiques dealer was trying so hard to persuade a farmer that the unique and almost priceless antique wasn’t really worth much, that while the antique dealer went to…