Talks, Sermons and Reflections

John 15:26-16:15 It is a very special few days: we have Ascension, Pentecost and, next Sunday, Trinity At Pentecost we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit The Spirit can come dramatically – like in our first reading (Acts 2:1-4): the sound of a wind, tongues of fire and the disciples speaking in tongues. I have had experience of that. I had been asked to speak about being filled with the Spirit to our college Christian Union. It was the first time I had spoken. I spent hours preparing the talk. I was so nervous that I knocked over a bottle of milk as I came forward to speak. I read from my notes. And amazingly, God turned up. It was like Pentecost. At the end two people made the decision to follow Jesus, and to the best of my knowledge they are still going strong; and we had to have a chill out room because people were just, like drunk, with the overwhelming presence of God. But the Spirit also comes very gently. In John, we are given another description of the coming of the Spirit...

John 7.37-39 Three verses – but there is so much here.  Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit “Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive" 1. We receive the Holy Spirit when we come to Jesus, when we believe in him. ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink’ (John 7.37) When we come to Jesus, then he will give us a glass with this life-giving water, and if we believe him, if we trust him, we will take that glass and we will drink it.  I’ve been trying to think through what it means to come to Jesus, because Jesus says it so often – especially in John The people he is speaking to, could literally go to him physically with their bodies. But that did not mean that they were going to him with their minds or their hearts. They could go intending to be entertained by him, laugh at him, criticise him, judge him, to condemn him. Many of them did. That is not coming to Jesus We cannot go to him in the same way physic...

John 17.1-11 Jesus is reigning in glory. We are told that he is in heaven and is praying for us. And John 17 is one of the prayers that Jesus prays for us. It is the final prayer of Jesus before they arrest him and take him to be crucified. He pours out his heart – his deepest desire – to God his Father.  And what he prays for his disciples then – he prays for us now. SO WHAT DOES JESUS PRAY? He prays that we, his people, are protected so that we might be one. V11: ‘Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one’.   V21: ‘I ask .. that they may all be on. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us’ V23: ‘I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one’. We usually pray for protection from enemies, persecution, poverty, stress, shame, loneliness, sickness, sadness and things like that. But Jesus doesn’t pray that we will be protected from those things – at least not h...

Acts 2.1-4 I was very struck, when I pointed to that banner and asked someone what is was about, that the answer they gave me was, 'hell'. Fire can represent the absence of God: hell and destruction. Sodom and Gomorrah are two cities in the Old Testament, where people had rejected God and there was serial violence and abuse, and they are destroyed by fire (Genesis 3:24) Jesus speaks of the ‘eternal fire’ of hell (Matthew 18:8); Revelation speaks of the second death being a lake of fire, into which even death and hades are thrown (Revelation 20:14)   And we may be familiar with those images of hell: of Dante’s inferno (although interestingly, the deepest pit of hell is not fire, but ice - the absence even of heat), Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmares, and the icons of the last judgement. But fire is also about the presence of God God appears to Moses in a burning bush (Exodus 3:2) God leads the people of Israel, at night, by a pillar of fire (Exodus 13:21) ...

John 15.26-27; 16.4-15 Holy Spirit is like a language teacher – a personal language tutor. Those of you who are language teachers, or who have had language teachers, will know that they have several tasks. They need to teach the skills of the language: the vocabulary and the grammar But they also need to teach their students how to live in the new language: how to see things in a new way, and how to think in a new way. If you start to live in a new language, you start to make different connections. For instance, one of the things I have wondered about is the difference between a language like Russian, which has gender differences deeply rooted in its language, and a language like English that is principally a-gender. And that must have an impact on how we think. Or it could be little connections that open up new ways of thinking for you. For example: Belgrade is the capital of Serbia. To somebody who does not know the language, it is just the name of a city....

Luke 3.15-22 It is a dirty place out there. Herod, in our reading, is an example of that. He wants to live life his way. And when John challenges him, he uses his power to silence him. And that is not unknown today: we think of rulers, political parties, businesses who have used their power to suppress those who would challenge what they do. And it has not been unknown for the Church to use its position of power to cover up its dirty secrets. But there also dirt in here, in the human heart . John the Baptist calls the people who come to hear him preach, ‘a brood of vipers’. Not the quickest way to win friends and influence people. He declares that God’s judgement is coming on a generation of people who have forgotten God and yet are spiritually complacent. They have chosen to be blind to those in need, to live for stuff, and if they’ve already got stuff, live for more stuff, and to use whatever power they have to push others down so that they can get more and go up...

1 Corinthians 12.1-13 listen to ‘on spiritual gifts and speaking in tongues’ on audioBoom We are looking for the next few weeks at 1 Corinthians 12 – 14 and at spiritual gifts. Paul does not want us to be ‘uninformed’ about the gifts 1. He begins this chapter by speaking of the heart of the spiritual person. 1 Cor 12.1 literally says ‘And now concerning the spiritual (people, gifts, things)’ People talk a great deal about being spiritual. It can mean that they are into yoga or dowsing or Gregorian chant or angels or they claim to be particularly sensitive or open to the world beyond our senses. But that is not what Paul understands here as spiritual. At the centre of the true spiritual person is a heart that worships Jesus Christ as Lord (v3). What we have here is a line. At one end are those people who declare that Jesus is cursed. They look at the Jesus Christ who we read about in the bible, [they see one who allowed himself to be crucified in love for s...