Methodist Bishop

John 16.1-5 For many years Trinity Sunday has coincided with my annual holidays, but this year there was a calendar malfunction.  Fortunately, earlier in the year something caught my eye in a blog about Christian contemplation, written by a Fanciscan priest called Richard Rohr. He was reminiscing about his childhood when, he recalled, priests used to tell him and his friends that the Trinity is a mystery, something so difficult to comprehend that we shouldn’t even try to understand it. I remember being told exactly the same thing, and it always seemed peculiar to me that we should be encouraged to believe in something which we couldn’t get our heads around. How can we really be expected to believe in something even if it’s a total mystery? The solution, as Richard Rohr observes in his blog, is that on every other day of the year most Christians get around the problem by behaving as though the Trinity doesn’t exist. Quoting the famous theologian Karl Rahner he says that, if ...

Do you like dancing - perhaps at weddings? Or do you like watching Strictly Come Dancing or Dancing on Ice? Or what about ballet? Even the presenter of BBC Radio’s culture programme admitted on air that he had never understood ballet or even been to the ballet. Someone called Richard Rohr, who writes a blog about Christian contemplation, says that God doesn’t just enjoy dancing, God isn’t just one of the dancers in the dance of creation, God is the dance itself. [1] Think about the building blocks of life and the universe. They’re all made up of smaller particles or life forms bound together or moving around one another. In the atom there’s a lot of hugging and dancing going on. Protons and neutrons hold each other tightly in the nucleus of the atom while electrons dance around them, although I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. And in the tiny cells that make up all living things there’s an ancient life form hiding, called mitochondria, which you c...

Genesis 28.10-22 This an interesting passage because so much of it can be read in either of two ways, a rather negative way or in a really positive way. In the dream God says to Jacob, 'I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go… I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’ On the face of it this is a wonderful promise. Jacob is a penniless fugitive without a friend in the world, but God will be with him, watching over him, ensuring that he will prosper. On my 19th birthday Helen gave me a little book. It finished with the words, 'Let’s be friends for ever and a day.' But God's promise to Jacob isn't ‘for ever and a day.’ God says, ‘I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’ It's not really a promise, it's a deal. To use management jargon for a moment, it's activity based. While they're engaged in the project together, God will be there for him. But what if the project ended? What if ...