The lectionary Gospels for Easter and the second and third Sundays thereafter all tell resurrection stories as befits the Easter Season. But this reading is the only one to be used every year; the Sunday after Easter, each year, this is the story we hear. This seems odd because I’m sure it’s not our favourite…
Christians have observed Lent – forty days, mirroring Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness since at least the fourth century. In the Orthodox church the forty days doesn’t include Holy Week making for a Lent longer than ours. Lent is a paradox: in order to live life fully in the here and now, we embrace…
Ash Wednesday 2019 We had a bit of a pancake feast at the Vicarage yesterday; lots of lemons and maple syrup. And I was delighted to hear that our messy sermon group had similarly good time last Sunday – not just lemons and maple syrup chocolate and raspberry sauces and other sweet treats. That was…
4 before Lent Today’s three readings act of a sort of review of how things are between us and God. So in the wonderful passage from Isaiah we glimpse God’s majesty and immense being – so immense that the huge Temple at Jerusalem can contain only the hem of God’s robe. Isaiah is so awestruck…
Personal space – it’s something that we preserve for ourselves and observe in our dealings with other people. And how uncomfortable we feel when someone invades our personal space – I can see myself retreating backwards to a place of safety. In fact, our sense of personal space is very complex – our invisible boundary…
Refugee Nativity A church in America, has, for the last 40 years had a nativity scene with real live animals. Last year, Stormy the cow escaped twice in one day and caused a considerable amount of chaos – and, some of the church members felt, was not treated very well! So this year the church…
Years ago – and some of you will have heard me talking about this before – I went to a performance of John’s Gospel at St Luke’s Church in Blackburn – just next to St Wilfrid’s School. I say ‘performance’ because it featured a solitary actor who proclaimed the whole of John’s Gospel from memory…
Oswald was a member of the Irthing family – there’s still a village just east of Carlisle called Irthington. He was born around 604, the son of the Northumbrian King Aethelfrith. A victim of political change, Oswald spent his childhood in exile on the Island of Iona where he heard about Christianity and became a…
Today’s gospel is difficult because it begins with a discussion about casting out demons. This isn’t something we’re comfortable with – it sounds more something from a horror film than something we encounter in our everyday lives. In Jesus’ time, anyone who defied social norms was suspected of being possessed by demons – people who…
The modern addiction to success, or being better, (or even the best) is dangerous and is leading us slowly but surely into disaster. It was this philosophy of racial superiority which lead to the tragedy summed up by the word ‘Auschwitz’ – although the extermination of European Jews was much, much wider than Auschwitz alone…