Methodist Bishop

On Crazy People, by Casting Crowns When I heard the song, I liked it. It’s funny. I’m not sure it’s woke, though. If you know what I mean?  Woke means ‘being alert to racial discrimination and other kinds of prejudice’. And some people feel that the word crazy is un woke because it stigmatizes mental health issues.  According to woke people, calling someone crazy seems to imply that he or she isn’t living in the real world and can’t make rational decisions, that they’re mentally deranged.  I looked up the politically correct alternatives to crazy. A woke dictionary suggested, ‘ irration al , r idiculous , s illy and a bsurd’. If you think it actually is absurd to suggest that the word crazy can be replaced by the word absurd then I guess you’re un woke. But crazy does have wider meanings that have nothing to do with mental health. It can mean ‘to be infatuated with someone’ or ‘to be passionately excited or very enthusiastic about something’.  I guess the song wr...

  John 10.1-10,  Acts 2.42-47 One night, BBC regional news reported on a farmer who had lost several prize rare breed  sheep. His mistake had been to pen them in a field next to a busy road, where rustlers could spot them. The field was locked and gated, so the thieves rounded them up in broad daylight, tied their feet together and threw them over the gate to be taken away in a cattle truck. Passersby, whizzing along in their cars, didn’t see anything amiss. Most of them probably had no background in farming and might not have realised there was anything odd. Perhaps they thought that shepherds tie their sheep up and throw them around every time they move them.  However, eventually something happened to cause the rustlers to make their getaway. Did someone raise the alarm and cause a gatekeeper to come along? Be that as it may, one sheep - still trussed up - was left behind inside the gate. The sheep were probably stolen for slaughter,with the meat being exported...

  Genesis 1:24–31; 2:7–24, Luke 8.22-25 The first two stories in the Book of Genesis have  generated more controversy than any other part of the Bible.  For Biblical Literalists they’re a plain account of the dawn of time and the ancient fossils and rock formations that scientists find in the geological record have just been put there by God to mislead us - a sort of trail of false evidence leading the unwary away from the truth.  For more liberal minded Christians the stories are like a nut, with an outer shell of fabulous storytelling which cracks open to reveal an inner kernel of timeless truth.  As if that conflict over the interpretation of the two stories wasn't enough, the stories also range across some of the biggest issues confronting humankind. We're only a couple of pages into the Bible and yet already we’re being challenged to think about the meaning of life, the universe and everything. The writer of the second version of the creation story assumes ...