Methodist Bishop

Psalm 89.1-4, 15-18 (NRSVA) This is one of the royal psalms which may have been sung at the coronation of a new ruler or on other national holidays. It begins by celebrating the rock solid reliability of God’s promises and then focuses specifically on his covenant with the royal house of David. God is supposed to have promised David that his descendants would rule over Israel forever, although building his throne from generation to generation - which was probably intended to mean the same thing - is in fact a slightly different idea. It implies only the continuity of the government and nation state established by David. Be that as it may, God’s favour towards Israel can only mean that the people of Judah can afford to be joyful and should exult or rejoice in God’s name. Their horn of plenty should always be full and they should expect to be shielded from harm. The king is God’s appointee, so what could possibly go wrong? This is the sort of sentiment which encouraged Hananiah to oppose...

‘Make haste to answer me!’ Psalm 69.7-18 (NRSVA) This psalm has been a source of inspiration ever since it was first composed. Jesus’ disciples remembered verse 9 when he got upset with the moneychangers in the Temple at Jerusalem. ‘Zeal for God’s house has consumed him,’ they thought, (John 2.17). A similar zeal has consumed generations of Methodists so it’s ironic that we now find ourselves locked out of our much loved church buildings. Many people continue to put their hope in worship life returning to normal again, while others hope that perhaps we shall rethink what ‘God’s house’ really means. Paul quotes the same verse in Romans 15.3, when he says that the Roman Christians should ‘build up’ or encourage their neighbours because ‘the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.’ But he’s not saying that when people think ill of them this reflects badly on him. He hardly knew them. He’s saying that this verse applies to Jesus himself. When people insult Jesus, those insults a...

Matthew 10.40-42 Today congregations from all denominations are having to rethink what it means to be church. The old model is no longer working. Perhaps it never did, and perhaps our failure to adopt the right model helps to explain the gradual decline of organised Christianity in the West.  The prevailing model for the last 150 years has been congregations gathering together primarily for worship. Whether worship means having a good sing, or sharing communal prayers, or gathering around the table to share Holy Communion, it’s been focused on honouring and praying to God.  But does God need our songs of praise? Do we really need to gather together to draw God's attention to the world's problems? And what are we expecting to achieve by meeting Christ in bread and wine at the table of the Lord? In chapter 10, as we’ve seen before, Matthew uses the way Jesus and his disciples engaged in mission to suggest another way of being church - an alternative model which might be more app...

Jeremiah 20.7-13 (NRSV) This is a page from Jeremiah's spiritual journal where he reflects privately on the difficulties of being a prophet. His name’s forever associated with doom and gloom; to this day people accuse pessimistic forecasters of being ‘a Jeremiah’. And of course his bleak warnings got on people’s nerves. They took turns either to reproach him for lowering national morale or to deride him for being a ‘remoaner’, always imagining disaster instead of planning for success.  Even his friends distanced themselves from Jeremiah. After all, he’d spent time in prison for his stand against the government’s foolishly optimistic policies. ‘Terror is all around!’ they whispered, ‘Why not conform?’ When he still refused to listen there was understandable pressure on his allies to denounce him. Some people tried to entice him to change sides, others tried to wear him down. His enemies tried to take revenge on him for the damage that his fearless campaigning had done to their reput...

Romans 6.1b-11 (NRSVA) The arguments which Paul sets out in his letter to the church in Rome became - much later - the foundations on which the Protestant interpretation of Christianity was constructed. They were also deeply influential for early Methodism. It was while he was listening to Martin Luther’s explanation of Paul’s Letter to the Romans that John Wesley found his heart strangely warmed by a new understanding of what being a disciple of Jesus really means. Paul’s predicament was that he was eager to visit the new and influential church in Rome but most of the Christians there didn’t know him personally, and what they had heard about him had left them feeling deeply uneasy. Paul found himself compelled, therefore, to set out the truth about what he believed, in contrast to the stories that were circulating about his teaching. Chief among these seems to have been the idea that human beings are irredeemably flawed by a deeply ingrained self-centredness and can only trust in God’...

Matthew 10.24-39 This section of Matthew’s Gospel is a collection of Jesus’ sayings, all of which are also found in other New Testament passages. One, an amplification of some words found in Mark’s Gospel, also closely parallels one of Micah’s prophecies about families turning against each other, as well as being almost identical to a saying recorded by Luke. Did Jesus say similar things on different occasions, some shorter and more pithy, others longer and more resonant with Micah’s warning? It’s more than likely that he did. There’s almost a random quality about this grouping of Jesus’ sayings. Almost all of them also occur in Luke’s version of events, and some are echoed by John, but in completely different contexts. They are then, what people sometimes call, ‘floating sayings’ - memorable phrases or comments, but no one knows when Jesus said them or how many times. I say, the grouping of the sayings looks ‘almost’ random because, on closer examination, they all seem to be about co...

Romans 5.1-8 This passage is a beautiful explanation of the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross. ‘While we were still weak… Christ died for the ungodly… Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person… but God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.’ Our covenant relationship with God is sealed when we have ‘faith’ in Jesus’ death, which gives us ‘access to this grace in which we stand’ and makes peace between us and God. But is Paul right when he says, ‘Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person - though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die’? The coronavirus pandemic has reminded us that people do die for another, often without knowing those they put their own life at risk to save. I think, for example, of doctors who have come out of retirement to work with coronavirus patients, some of whom have died. Perhaps it’s  not so rare as Paul imagined, but this way of living and dying exemplifies how God loves us. Paul do...

Psalm 100 Some of the psalms are psalms of lament, which has made them particularly appropriate for study and contemplation during the pandemic. But Psalm 100 is a psalm of rejoicing. The psalmist imagines crying out with joy to the Lord or making a joyful noise. God calls forth gladness. ‘Come into his presence with singing,’ says the psalm, echoing the exaltation of God by the whole creation, something which we most emphatically cannot do during lockdown and its aftermath. Just looking around at nature convinces the psalmist that God is for real. Verse 3 says, ‘He made us, and we are his’ or, ‘he made us, we did not make ourselves’.  The latter meaning has always seemed less likely to translators. Why on earth, they have wondered, would we want to make ourselves? But, in fact, we’ve become used to shaping nature to suit ourselves - cutting down forests to grow more crops, selectively breeding plants and animals, creating urban living and high speed travel as well as super-connect...

Exodus 19.2-8a In the Bible God is revealed as a ‘covenant’ God. A covenant can come across as transactional, ‘If you do this for me, I’ll do that for you’: “If you obey my voice and keep my covenant…” If! I don’t think it's really intended in that sense here in Exodus. I think the covenant is envisaged as being more like an ‘undertaking’ or ‘pledge’ or ‘promise’. ‘If you do this, I won’t let you down!’ But obedience isn’t necessarily the real emphasis of this passage. Nicholas King points out that ‘if you obey my voice’ is only one way of understanding the Hebrew text in verse 5. Another way of translating the same expression is, ‘If you are really going to hear my voice’. In other words it could be about listening. “If you really listen to me I will be able to make you special.” In the context of discipleship the covenant promise is both a wonderful gift and a huge responsibility, an invitation and a challenge. If we really listen to God we have the potential to become special pe...

One of the things that the coronavirus pandemic has reminded us about is that we’ve been living in an age of ‘cheap grace’. Life was easy for most of us, most of the time. The bad things and the bad times were the exception, not the rule. So we took for granted foreign holidays, cheap food, convenient travel and gainful employment. That was the natural order of things and when it went awry it needed to be restored. Being a Christian, if we’re honest, was pretty easy. We had to remember our less fortunate neighbours and try to do something to help them, but for most of us, most of the time, life was fairly good. When tragedy struck we had to be ready to deal with it, if we could, but if we were lucky it might be long delayed. We’re not the first people to live in an age of ‘cheap grace’. When Christianity first became the official religion its adherents had the same experience. They went overnight from being on the edge of society, not entirely respectable, persecuted even, to becomi...

Matthew 9.35-10.8 Often the terms apostle and disciple are used interchangeably, especially when referring to the twelve men whom Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us Jesus chose to be his first missionaries. However, Luke diverges slightly from the others. For him The Twelve are just the first wave of missionaries and he links Jesus’ challenge to go out and bring in the harvest with the call of seventy missionaries. Are they apostles too? Strictly speaking they ought to be because the word ‘apostle’ simply means ‘messenger’ or ‘someone sent out with instructions’, whereas a disciple is an ‘apprentice’, or someone who 'follows' or 'learns' from their teacher. Clearly The Twelve, and Jesus’ other followers, started out as his apprentices or students, but at some point on their journey he commissioned many of them to become messengers too. This applies, for example, to Mary Magdalene and even to people who never met Jesus during his earthly ministry. Paul was fiercely dete...

Psalm 8 Psalm 8 is one of the psalms quoted by Jesus in the New Testament. In Matthew 21.16 he rebukes the Jewish priests and scribes, who’ve objected to children crying out ‘Hosanna to the Son of David.’ He quotes verse 2: ‘Have you never read, “Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself?” In the Old Testament translation of the psalm the New Revised Standard Version renders this as ‘babes and infants’, prudishly omitting to make clear that these are ‘babes at the breast’. The odd thing about this is that babies can’t speak! Is it just the sheer joy and wonder that we experience when we’re with tiny children that confounds those who are unimpressed by God’s creation? This is something many of us have missed during lockdown. Psalm 8 also revisits the astounding idea - first found in Genesis 1 - that we’re like God. Even though he’s created the universe, God still cares for each one of us. Have we been made ‘a little lower than God’ or ‘...

Matthew 28.16-20 (NRSVA) In yesterday’s reflection on the closing verses of 2 Corinthians we saw how the idea of God as Trinity can be traced back to Jesus himself. And this is made explicit in today’s Gospel passage from Matthew. Jesus never ascends to God in Matthew’s version of events, but he does meet his closest disciples on a mountaintop where some of them worship him, although Matthew pragmatically admits that some doubted what was going on. Did they think they were seeing a ghost, or that it was a trick of the light, like the Brocken spectre which haunts the Yorkshire Moors. This phenomenon is named after a mountain in Germany where it was first described. It looks like an ethereal figure enveloped in light or in a rainbow arc. Or did the disciples just doubt that they should be worshipping Jesus? Jewish people have always been very clear that there’s only one God, who’s indivisible. So perhaps they were doubtful about worshipping him even if they believed he was a tr...

Genesis 1.2-2.4a NRVA The first act of the Trinity was the creation of the universe, which is the same as to say that there has never been a time when God was not three-in-one. We know this because Genesis says that ‘in the beginning’ there was ‘God’ and ‘the Spirit of God swept over the face of the waters,’ or ‘rushed’ or ‘hovered’ over them - perhaps like a bird. And then John’s Gospel boldly goes on  to state that ‘in the beginning was The Word, and The Word was with God, and The Word was God.’ And this Word both spoke things into being, (‘and God said’), and ’came to his own... people’, to dwell with them and rescue them from the darkness that had engulfed the world in the course of human history. That it was always in God’s nature to share our humanity should come as no surprise because Genesis goes on to say that ‘God created humankind in his image; male and female he created them.’ For us to be ‘like God’ in any credible way, God has got to have the innate potential to ...

2 Corinthians 12.11-13 God is never referred to as ‘The Trinity’ anywhere in the Bible. But the idea of God as Trinity is there, and this passage is one example. Paul is rounding off his letter, one of three that he sent to the Church in Corinth. ‘Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell,’ he says. They are to try to live in the love, peace and harmony which the Trinity exemplifies. To do this they will have to stop squabbling, ‘put things in order’ and ‘listen to [Paul’s] appeal.’ As a young man, I found my attempts to persuade young female acquaintances that it would be good to ‘greet one another with a holy kiss’ were treated with some scepticism. This was one verse they weren’t always keen to put into practice. It’s certainly not an option just now! But then comes the famous prayer of blessing which we now call ‘The Grace’, because of its opening words. Paul prays that ‘the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit’ might be with ...

John 7.37-39 (NRSVA) One of the more obscure arguments in Christian history concerns a phrase in the Nicene Creed, ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son .’ Those words in italics constitute just one single word in Latin, ‘Filioque’. But from them sprang the ‘Filioque Controversy’.  Roman Catholics, and subsequently Protestants too, believe that the Holy Spirit flows from Jesus as well as from God and draw their conviction about this from verses like verse 39: ‘Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.’ Other Christians maintain that this is incorrect. The Spirit comes from God alone and isn’t subservient to Jesus in any way, which presumably explains why some ancient texts read, ‘ for as yet the Spirit had not been given ’. Jesus’ proclamation, paraphrasing Isaiah 55.1, that anyone who is thirsty may come to hi...

1 Corinthians 12:3-13 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) In the film ‘The Day of the Jackal’ the assassin goes under various disguises. The police finally think they’ve discovered who he really is but it turns out that once again he’s borrowed someone else’s name, so at the end of the film his identity remains a mystery.  Not so a Christian, at least according to St Paul. They say you can always tell a Yorkshireman, but you cannot tell him much. Well, St Paul is confident that you can always tell a Christian, because the Christian will be indwelt and empowered by God’s Holy Spirit. So, for example, a Christian can never curse the name of Jesus. This is not strictly true. Under persecution people have renounced their allegiance to Jesus while remaining secret believers. In Japan, during the sixteenth century persecution there, the parishioners of a captured priest would be relentlessly tortured until he agreed to walk over a crucifix as a sign of his renunciation of the f...

Psalm 104:24-35 ( https://www.biblegateway.com , NRSVA) We’re often told that the people of ancient Israel feared the sea, but here the psalmist seems to positively relish it. The earth is full of God’s creatures, and the psalmist has already thought about the birds and the beasts earlier in the psalm, but here he or she begins to describe life in the great, wide ocean deeps.  Innumerable creeping things are there. The mind boggles! Are these crabs and lobsters? What about the innumerable fish that used to swim among the Red Sea reefs?  Leviathan gets a mention. Is that meant to be a whale? Or a crocodile? Or a dragon, as in the Greek translation of the Old Testament? Or is it the seven-headed sea monster which battled with the rain god Baal in ancient Canaanite religion? If so, it’s no longer a frightening foe but a playmate or clubbable friend created for God to sport with. God’s wisdom has created life on earth and his spirit or breath gives breath to all living th...