Pause for Thought – 16 October 2020

Proverbs 1:1-9 Philippians 4:4-9 Mark 10:13-16 I heard of a young mother who gave birth to twins, and rang the local newspaper to put a notice in the personal column. She gave the person at the other end all the details, but unfortunately the reception was bad, and she was asked, ‘will you repeat that?’…

Matthew 16:21-28 Self-denial’s clearly an important element of tonight’s reading. That isn’t something that’s really compatible with life in the 21st century. I suppose it’s about as popular a topic as defending the ice cream sabotaging super villain from last week’s episode the Great British Bake Off. However, we cannot avoid that in tonight’s reading…

Psalm 119:33-40 Matthew 7:24-17 1 Corinthians 3:10-11 In my first church at Twyford, the Church Hall was built in 1935. Money was tight in the 1930s, not least for Nonconformists in rural areas, so they built the hall as cheaply as they could. The foundations, if they merit that word, were on brick deep. The…

Job 19:23-27a Luke 20:27-38 If you ever have the misfortune to travel on the M25 between the A3 and the M40, you’ll often encounter what are known as variable speed limits. The theory is that these stop the traffic bunching together by slowing traffic down, so that it doesn’t catch up with the traffic ahead…

The story of Jonah and the big fish 1 Samuel 3.1-10 Mark 1.14-20 It was December 1996, slightly more than half my lifetime ago, when I attended what the United Reformed Church calls a National Assessment Conference, a major part of the process of discerning a candidate’s call to the ministry. This was long before…

Isaiah 52:7-12 Acts 11:19-30 I reckon that if there’s anyone you want to meet that if you sit in the church coffee bar long enough, eventually they’ll come past. They the same about King’s Parade in Cambridge – if you walk up and down for long enough, whoever you want to meet will come past….