Talks, Sermons and Reflections

Focus on two icons Icons are for many of us pictures that come from an alien world. Idolatry – prohibition of second commandment: ‘You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.’ Sympathy with iconoclasm. And yet .. Icons: meaning ‘image’. Christ is the ‘eikon’ of God 1. Based on idea that Christ truly came in the flesh : The invisible God cannot be depicted in an image.That is still the same. But the coming of Jesus has changed something. The big issue behind the iconaclastic controversy was whether Christ was fully God and fully human. If he was, then the divine can be represented. One of earliest icons was of Christ (‘the image made without human hands’). St. John of Damascus, i n his treatise " On the Divine Image s" writes:  "If we've made an image of the invisible God, we would certainly be in error... but we do not do anythin...

John 20:1-10 What one sees depends on where one looks from. At the moment I am reading the Hobbit with one of our children. We’ve got to the very good bit at the end. The others are engaged in a fierce, life and death struggle with the Goblins. It looks as if they are going to be overwhelmed. But Bilbo, who does have the slight advantage of being invisible, is looking up and sees the eagles – coming to the rescue. Today we are invited to look at the world from outside an empty tomb – not any empty tomb, but the empty tomb in which Jesus had been laid. It is the perspective from which we need to view reality Yes there is the tomb. We live in a world which appears to be ruled by death. It is the fear of death which is probably the single greatest motivating force in this world. Death seems to have the last word. Death appears to triumph over love and life. Death – ghastly. We try to deny death. The lie that Satan told Eve, ‘You shall not die’. But when you st...

James 3:1-12 James has already spoken about the tongue 1:19: ‘Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry’ 1:26: ‘Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless.’ But now he expands on what he has said. He starts by talking about teachers, about people who use the tongue to teach of Jesus. He challenges a church where people were pushing themselves forward to be teachers. Everybody wanted to be up at the front, doing the ‘limelight’ jobs. I don’t think that that is an issue here. In fact I think we have the opposite problem: we actually need more people who are willing to be teachers – teachers of children, teachers in our groups, teachers here in church. We need people who are prepared, before God, to give themselves to this work, and to choose to place themselves under the stricter judgement But I guess that there is a point: don’t ass...

John 15:12-17 Luke was 20. He loved life. We’ve heard that. He was already looking beyond the current conflict to life together with a girl he passionately loved. But he died on active service. He died doing a job that he loved,  doing it with people he deeply cared about. He died doing his duty, serving in the RAF Regiment and serving his country. He died for his friends That – we heard in our reading - is the definition of love: the giving up of your life for your friends. We often speak of the courage and the sacrifice of the men and women who serve in our armed forces. It is right to do so. But we also need to speak of the immense sacrifice that is made by the families left behind: of the wives and husbands, mums and dads, the fiancées, the girlfriends and boyfriends. When they sign up and go off to places of conflict, it is as if you have signed a blank cheque on your heart; you pray that that cheque will never be cashed, but you also know that at any time it could be. Tod...

John 19:25-27 Mothering Sunday 2010 I recently watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , when Benjamin discovers who his real mother was. Queenie, the woman who brings him up asks him, ‘Did you go to the grave of your mother?’ And Benjamin replies very firmly, ‘You are my mother’. We’ve all had mothers or mother figures But I am very aware that this is still a service which can be quite painful: painful for those of us who have lost mothers; painful for those who have longed to be biological mothers – but have not been able to have children, for whatever reason; painful for those who have very difficult memories of their mother. But this Mothering Sunday service never in fact set out to celebrate motherhood, although it is a good thing to celebrate. It comes from the BCP reading for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, which includes verses from Galatians 4, in which Paul contrasts two mothers: Sara the mother of Isaac, and Hagar the mother of Ishmael, both wives of Abraham....

PSALM 126   Joy Ellen from Glasgow in her autobiography tells of her father. He was a Presbyterian elder. She writes, “He was entirely unselfish, and in his long life never committed a pleasure.” H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy!" I rarely meet such people and the stereotype is a lie. Take the 16 th century Puritans for example: “Actually, the Puritans welcomed laughter and dressed in bright colors (or, to be precise, the middle and upper classes dressed in bright colours; members of the lower classes were not permitted to indulge themselves -- they dressed in dark clothes). As Carl Degler long ago observed, ‘The Sabbatarian, antiliquor, and antisex attitudes usually attributed to the Puritans are a nineteenth-century addition to the much more moderate and wholesome view of life's evils held by the [Puritans]’.” The Christian life really is about joy:  it is about a future joy that goes beyond anything tha...