Vicar's Christmas Message
1 December 2013
Over the weekend of 14/15 December this year, St Mary's will be holding its Christmas Tree Festival. This will be our third year of doing this. So it is rapidly becoming a tradition; a much-appreciated one. Individuals, schools, nurseries, local businesses, communities, organisations, clubs, charities all bring their trees, set them up in St Mary's church and decorate them. It looks and feels brilliant.
Luke 6: 20-31 Blessing
3 November 2013
The Bible Scholar R Alan Culpeper reminds us that we, especially in the West, have forgotten the idea of Blessing; the tradition of Blessing; the realisation that blessing has a real power and can be a genuine force for good, a force for God, in the world.
Harvest 2013
6 October 2013
A friend of mine the other day wondered where God was? That is to say, he wondered why God had been thinking about other things and had consequently allowed him to stumble and to hurt his foot while running for a bus.
We need to set aside the whole issue of expecting 'daddy' to protect us from everything - absolutely everything - that life throws at us. We're not teenagers who go round saying they hate their parents and wish they'd never been born. Although we know that this is just their way of expressing their frustration and unhappiness at certain circumstances.
Luke 14:25-33
8 September 2013
Hate's a very strong word, isn't it?
It can indeed be used in a strong context - e.g 'hate crime': the way people are so controlled, possessed, by an emotion to the extent that they become unreasonable, anti-social or even worse - violent and vindictive.
But that's not the way the word is used in our Gospel this morning (Luke 14.25-33). It isn't so much a milder meaning as a different meaning.