Talks, Sermons and Reflections

 Luke 13:1-8 This is a very Lenten passage. It is headed in many versions as saying ‘Repent or perish’. It is one of those passages which might be used by those excruciatingly embarrassing but also very brave street preachers.  I do hope that I am not going to be like them, but as you know I like to remain as faithful to the passage in front of us as I can – and I would like to suggest three things for which we need to repent.  1. We are called to repent of our judgementalism.   Some people have come to tell Jesus some news. Some pilgrims in Jerusalem, who had gone to make an annual sacrifice, had been murdered by Herod’s troops – the authorities. We have no alternative source for what might have happened, but we know that religious festivals could be high tension times and there were regular clashes between the authorities and pilgrims.  It seems that the people talking to Jesus imply that the murdered pilgrims must have been doing something sinful to have su...

Luke 4:1-12 The temptations of Christ. The Basilica of San Marco, Venice c1100-1150 The story is told of the boy whose parents found out that he was swimming in the river on his way home from school. They told him that he was not to do that. The following morning, mum thought it was wise to check his bag. She found in it a pair of swimming trunks. She said to him, ‘I thought I had told you not to go swimming on your way back from school’. And he replied, ‘It is OK mum. I wasn’t going to go swimming. I packed them just in case I was tempted’. Today, as this season of Lent starts, we read about the temptations of Jesus. Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted Interestingly, we pray a bit later in this service, ‘Lead us not into temptation’. We will look at that in our Lent course on the Lord’s Prayer, but I wonder whether one way to think about this is to consider that there are two kinds of temptations. There are those temptations which are too strong for us and wi...

Christ in the Wilderness. Ivan Kramskoy 1. Natural fasting : when we are emotionally so full or empty that we do not want to eat. For instance, when we are deep in grief, excited, anxious, sick, in love or simply feeling crushed and broken People in the Bible fast because they are broken (Nehemiah 1:4; Joel 2:12), anxious (Daniel 6:18; Esther 4:3), or because they long for God, righteousness and heaven (Psalm 69:9-10). 2. By fasting from something we acknowledge that what we have is gift and not right : that the good things God gives us are to be enjoyed and received with thanksgiving, but are not to control us/become our gods (1 Corinthians 7:5; 2 Timothy 4:4) 3. By fasting we empty ourselves so that we put aside some of the distractions in the world, and are more open to seek God, his guidance and his intervention (2 Samuel 12:23; Ezra 8:21-23; 2 Chronicles 20:3). Often, when we fast, we become aware of things in ourselves that we have been suppressing and of our sin...

Last week I attended a day organised by the Norfolk Gospel Partnership exploring AI and its blessings and curses. The day was titled Artificial Intelligence - Authentic Wisdom. The day was led by Chris Green, whose blog can be found here An image produced by AI These are some of my take aways and reflections from the day: 1. We use word languages for AI.   There is no 'cloud', no 'brain', no 'I' - even though AI, through Chat GPT, speaks in the 'I' form. It would be better if it was called not artificial intelligence but apparent intelligence 2. AI has no inbuilt morality.   It can be 'malicious' or 'benevolent', but has no will or common sense. Chris Green likened it to a really willing intern who completely lacks common sense 3. Things that we thought years to achieve: being an architect, lawyer, doctor, computer programmer can be done by AI in a few minutes. Things we think are easy, like catching a ball, it still finds incredibly di...