The Lord’s favour

Isaiah 61 In 1948, many thousands of Palestinian Christians were forced to flee from homes that their families had occupied for generations, when their country was partitioned, and they found themselves on the wrong side of lines drawn on maps. Most of them still live in refugee camps today. In Bethlehem, far from an idyllic…

John the Baptist

Mark 1:1-8 Isaiah 40:1-11 A teenage boy had just passed his driving test and asked his father as to when they could discuss his use of the car. His father said he’d make a deal with his son, “you bring your grades up from a C to a B, study your Bible a little, get…

Advent waiting

Mark 13:32-37 Isaiah 9:2,6-7 The bells of waiting Advent ring, the tortoise stove is lit again, begins John Betjeman’s famous poem. If you go into our Church Hall, you can still see the stone slab where the tortoise stove once stood. If you think our church is too modern, at least we kept the slab….

The sheep and the goats

Matthew 25:31-46 So, on this Sunday before Advent we’re presented with this difficult and unpopular passage. The passage is a reasonably well known, if unpopular, one. The gist of the story is that Jesus talks about good things that have been done by people, these he calls sheep and says they will receive eternal reward….

Stewardship

Luke 14:25-33 It’s always embarrassing when people talk about money, least of all in church. We will be talking about money in a moment, because the church has bills to pay, like everyone else. What I wanted to do was to set it in the wider context of God giving us all that we have,…