I’m sure you all know the song that Louis Armstrong used to sing in his distinctive and beautiful voice… I see trees of green, red roses too I see them bloom for me and you And I think to myself what a wonderful world I see skies of blue and clouds of white The bright blessed […]
Epiphany 2020
The beginning of a New Year might be as good a time as any to renew our faith or to find it somehow made new with some new revelation or ‘epiphany’. Of course, I can’t make that happen – it comes upon most of us as a kind of surprise mostly. But I offer something […]
Christmas day
Christians, as the world knows, are very fond of arguing. And some of our arguments just look ridiculous to the outside world. Just at the moment, the thing that Christians seem to argue about more than anything is sexuality. And some people look at us and shake their heads in dismay. But in different times […]
A virgin birth…
I know that a lot of people these days are fascinated to find out where they come from, who their ancestors were, even what their DNA reveals. You might have seen the adverts on TV encouraging you to treat a relative for Christmas to something called Ancestry.com. Perhaps you watch that TV programme ‘Who do […]
Stay woke!
‘Brothers and sisters; You know the time; now is the hour for you to awake from sleep’. I am sure that you are aware of the phrase, ‘Stay woke’. It actually goes back a way but it came to be heard much more when the Black Lives Matter campaign got going. It means something […]
Christ the King
So, today is the feast of Christ the King – what’s that about then? It’s the last Sunday of the Christian year before it begins again on Advent Sunday. But why Christ the King? It is quite a recent feast as these things go. It was designated Christ the King Sunday by Pope Pius XI […]
Being a bother
If you had to say who God’s favourite people are, or as we like to say in religious talk ‘his chosen ones’, I think you could do worse than suggest that God really likes widows. And I know that widows aren’t necessarily old, but most widows are. So, you could say, that God loves older […]
The power of words
I wonder whether you can remember any of the things that people said to you when you were a child. Perhaps you remember words that had a profound and lasting impact on you. There were surely some. Many of us, perhaps all of us, have a memory of words that deeply wounded us or shaped […]
Balm in Gilead
Jeremiah chapter 8 – ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’ It’s become one of those phrases or sayings from the Bible that many of us know and can quote, but can’t exactly place. But often we get it slightly wrong; because we might know the song that takes this verse. And there’s a subtle difference […]
The cost of discipleship
You know what they say; ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans’. Apparently it was Woody Allen who said it. It’s funny and wise – and most of us immediately grasp what he’s on about. I often think of this saying, because I’m the kind of person who likes to […]
Broken people….
Sometimes weeks can go by in the Bible readings in church and it can sound like stuff from a foreign land. The end of the world coming with fire… the moon like blood and the sun made dark. Or there are stories of people with diseases we are not likely to catch, tribes and peoples […]
Am I a God nearby
I imagine that most of us have had the experience of playing hide-and-seek with a child so young that they think that if they can’t see you you can’t see them. You remember, that hilarious moment when the two year old covers their own eyes and says ‘I’m hiding!’. And you have to decide whether […]