Hitchhikers guide to God

  What is the true gift of Harvest? So what is the value of harvest in our lives? What harvest are we celebrating? Are we celebrating just the physical harvest which is wonderful but perishes or the eternal harvest inside us all   Life is like going to university. We go to university to learn. University is not the goal – it is a means to the goal – it is to build muscles   We have physical, mental, spiritual muscles. ·         The more physical exercise we do the physically stronger we become. ·         The more intellectual exercise we do the stronger our intellectual muscles become. ·         The more we read, the more we reflect, the more we pray, the more we love the greater our spiritual muscles become. What is the HARVEST - it makes life easier – more joyful – more peaceful. If we practice the Beatitudes, we do indeed improve our lives. We do indee...

  Did Jesus bring fire and division, not peace within families and nations   Firstly, was Our Lord really anti-family? Secondly what was the wider impact of Christianity on communities and nations – If the Jews had accepted Our Lord’s teaching could the Temple have been saved from destruction and the Jewish nation from a dispersal? The context was that Our Lord was a Jew. He not only fulfilled the Jewish Law but built on it. He not only followed the Ten Commandments but he built on them.   However, the Fifth Commandment is "Honour your father and your mother." Surely this commandment focuses on the importance of loving respecting our parents?  Then again we remember that, when Jesus’s mother and brothers came to see Him in Capernaum (a nine hour walk from Nazareth!), they were unable to reach Him because of the crowd. When Jesus was told that his family were outside waiting to see him he replied, “My mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God and car...

  Footprints in the sand - John (14:23-28)   Recently I was lost on sand dunes at Dunnock on the North East of Scotland – just 400 miles from the Arctic circle   I had gone for a long walk on a vast sandy shoreline with enormous dunes   Quite suddenly found myself cut off from land by a large, deep, sandy lagoon I found myself back on my old standby of following footprints. Footprints can tell you a lot. Who use the path, which direction they were going. When the last person used that path Whether they were alone or in company. Generally, I don’t follow children’s foot prints. I don’t follow casual walkers prints with no tread on their boots. I follow recent, larger prints made by serious walkers with good tread on their boots I needed to find such foot prints and then follow a track made by serious walkers who had walked their recently I also needed the hope of seeing a person on the landward side of the lagoon. Eventually I did indeed see such...

Unbelievable truths of Easter and Holy week - and Jesus's ministry One of my favourite BBC 4 programmes is the amusing quiz game Unbelievable Truths. In it contestants deliver a short talk on a subject – but containing a string of falsehoods and fantastic untruths. The winner is the one who includes up to five unbelievable truths - which of course sound like lies.  For instance, it is said that Donavan swapped an Andy Warhol painting for a sofa – which was true! (The painting is now worth £850,000) I always think Holy Week would make and excellent subject for a programme - provided the participants were all atheists or unbelievers In short you couldn’t make up all the unbelievable but necessary truths associated with both Holy Week or indeed the whole of Our Lords Ministry ·        Who would have believed Our Lord’s detailed prophesy of His own death and resurrection ·        Who would have believed that he raised Lazarus after being in his t...

Easter Resurrection - Mary Magdalene & the empty tomb! John 20:1-18   This must be one of the most intense scenes in the whole Bible Last Easter we considered the extraordinary chain of events which lead up to our Lord’s Crucifixion. This Easter I thought we would consider awe inspiring detail of the discovery of Our Lord’s resurrection to help us to be actually with Mary in the garden of the tomb From his brutal, criminal crucifixion our Lord went to a royal burial. Normally executed criminals were not buried but left in the open to be devoured by vultures. However once Joseph of Arimathea had requested Jesus’s body, he laid Him in his own freshly cut tomb. He was joined by Nicodemus. Its worth remembering that both were members of the Sanhedrin - the very council which had conspired to convict Jesus Joseph’s tomb was in a garden conveniently close to Golgotha. This was important as the Sabbath was approaching and would have delayed the burial Nicodemus brought 75 ...

  The Fig Tree and Us   -  Luke (13:31-35) The Fig Tree is in fact mentioned twice in the Gospel Firstly in the parable the vineyard owner is God. The sympatric gardener is Jesus, and the fruitless Fig tree the pharisees   Secondly later Jesus curses a fig tree near Jerusalem days before his crucifixion - perhaps by way of demonstration and as a reminder of His earlier teaching Both Matthew and Mark record. ….’.In the morning, as Jesus was returning to the city, He was hungry. / Seeing a fig tree by the road, He went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. “May you never bear fruit again!” He said. And immediately the tree withered.’ Matthew 21:18-19 Religious practice in Jesus’s time had become stiff and rule bound. In the chapter before today’s Gospel Luke has pharisees objecting to Jesus healing on the Sabbath Our Lord gave the Jews 3 years of teaching culminated in the Beatitudes – which were the fulfilment and completion of the Jewish Tora...