Sometimes, but much more so at Christmas, I feel as though I live in the inside of a kaleidoscope. You know the old-fashioned cardboard tubes you look through to see a coloured pattern at the end. Then you twist the tube and the pattern changes again and again. At this time of year, it seems…
Luke 1:5-64 What did the preacher say when he’d lost his voice? Nothing. He’d lost his voice. Our reading from Luke is all about lost and found. Mary finds her voice and sings a song for the ages. Tied up with her story is another story about a man who first loses, and then later…
Isaiah 11:1-10 Matthew 3:1-6 “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out,” said the Decca Recording Co. in 1962 as they rejected the Beatles. In 1943 the chairman of IBM announced that, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” On the same theme, in 1981 Bill…
Jeremiah 33:14-16 Luke 21:25-36 I wonder if you’ve ever been on one of those car journeys where you’ve finally got everything and everyone loaded up, and ready to go, and finally get on your way much later than you hoped. At this rate you won’t be there until midnight. And then, after you’ve barely got…
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 Psalm 72 Revelation 1:4b-8 John 18:33-37 Borders can cause all sorts of problems. In many ways, many borders around the world are totally artificial, and that shows in the chaos which ensues. In 1787, the Treaty of Paris basically laid out which British territories would go to the freshly victorious American rebels,…
I am taking as my text, Hebrews 10 v 23 and 24: “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” The lectionary reading for today includes our gospel reading from…
Jonah 3:1-5 &10 Hebrews 9:24-28 Mark 1:14-20 Possibly not since the 7th century dispute between the Celtic and Roman Churches over the date of Easter, and certainly since the 17th century dispute between Puritans and Churchmen over Good Friday (a dispute that led those who closed their shops on Good Friday to be prosecuted during…
John 8:31-36 Savonarola was a Dominican priest and reformer of the church shortly before Martin Luther’s time. He lived in Florence, where he was a very powerful man, but eventually he was tortured and burned at the stake for his efforts, when Martin Luther was still a teenager. Early in his ministry, Savonarola noticed an…
John 8:31-36 The current television show using the tried and tested formula is Would I lie to you, in which contestants tell incredible stories, allegedly about themselves, and the other team has to guess whether they’re telling the truth or not. Sometimes the really incredible is, in fact, true, and sometimes the really incredible…
Many of us feel that we live in a world that is beyond our control, and life is in a constant flux of change. The implication of that is that we have to decide whether we want to keep trying to control a storm that is not going to go away, or whether we are…