Morning Worship – Sunday 1 November

Luke 10:30-37 John 8:31-38 Galatians 5:1, 13-21 “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” And the same applies to the word ‘freedom’. Whenever we start talking about ‘freedom’ we very soon realise that we may…

In Wales and Scotland many road signs are bilingual. There are several road signs in Wales which, famously, make sense in English, but for which the Welsh, when translated back into English, reads, “Thank you for emailing the translation department. We will respond to your email when we reopen on 19 October”. Likewise, there is…

Isaiah 7:10-16 Psalm 80:1-8, 18-20 Romans 1:1-7 Matthew 1:18-end One hundred and seventy years ago Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published: a story of a visionary dream leading to a change of heart. The tale features Ebenezer Scrooge, who seven years after the death of his business partner Joseph Marley, has become cruel and…

Matthew 2:1-12 Deep beneath the Bodleian Library in Oxford, there are many rooms of movable book stacks. Hardly any of the Bodleian’s collection is on open shelves, and most have to be ordered. You used to fill in a little slip, and an hour or so later your book would be ready for you. However,…

Psalm 23 1 John 3:16-end John 10:11-18 Well it’s hotting up. The General Election is round the corner, and most of us are feeling a mixture of battered and bewildered by the barrage of promises, the endless stream of claim and counter claim. Those of us who aren’t economists really have little idea what pledges…

The Orkney poet George Mackay Brown cast the story of the road to Emmaus into verse, in a poem written in the voice of ‘A Landlady in Emmaus.’ Her lodgers are ordinary working people called Tom and Ed, and they’d taken up with a travelling preacher who was accused of being a terrorist and was…