Methodist Bishop

  Genesis 16, Matthew 4.1-11 Many passages in the Bible, and especially in the Old Testament, are a challenge for anyone who believes that the whole of Scripture is the inspired revelation of God. The stories they relate can be very upsetting, especially when measured by modern standards of behaviour. Hagar finds herself in an abusive relationship. She’s a slave and probably a young teenager. Slavery was an accepted institution in ancient Israel. Slave girls were often captured in raids carried out by warring neighbours. But in Hagar's case she was probably sold into slavery to settle a family debt. Sarai's decision to make Hagar sleep with her husband takes Hagar's slavery to new depths. No doubt Abram wasn't the only man in ancient Israel who slept with his wife's slave girl. Jeffrey Epstein was still procuring sex slaves for himself and his entitled friends in the Twenty-first Century. The unusual thing about Hagar's story is that it appears in a sacred text....

Mark 6.1-13, 2 Corinthians 12.2-10 It's very appropriate, perhaps even providential, that as a new local preacher begins her journey the Gospel reading for this Sunday should happen to be the one about the call of the first local preachers. Before we come to that we have some rare comments from Jesus about the nature of his call from God. Ironically, the people who know us best - our family, friends and neighbours - are sometimes the hardest to convince that we have something inspirational to say. As the song says, they know us too well. Familiarity breeds not necessarily contempt but at least scepticism. Perhaps that's only to be expected. All saints or inspiring leaders have feet of clay and those best acquainted with us are all too aware of our weaknesses, which can sometimes conceal our strengths. However, that doesn't really explain the failure of his family and neighbours to trust the claims of someone as truly inspirational as Jesus. Perhaps they just couldn't be...

Psalm 139.1-7, John 18.33-37 God knows us like our bestest friend. That is both reassuring and alarming. My wife gave me a birthday card when she was still my girlfriend. It said, 'Lets be best friends for ever and a day!' And that's just what we are. After a while best friends know exactly what you are thinking. Sometimes my wife and I say the same thing at exactly the same moment. After a while best friends can tell one another's stories. My wife hates it when I finish a story that she began. But then sometimes she will break into one of my stories. I look at her and she says, 'What?' And I say, 'You're doing it to me!' It's a standing joke in our family. Best friends know how one another are feeling. Sometimes my wife says, 'Didn't you know that I was upset?' And I say, 'Yes, but I didn't know how to respond.' But I still knew.  And God knows us far more intimately than our very bestest friend. That is both deeply reass...

Romans 5.1-8 What does it take to change the world? Because it was New Year a newspaper once published 100 ways to slightly improve your life without even trying. That’s an attractive proposition, isn't it - making things better for ourselves and the world around us with very little effort?  Here’s a sample of the suggestions. For instance, the article says that if we want to get fit we should aim to exercise on a Monday night ‘because nothing fun ever happens on a Monday night’, so we won’t be missing out on anything. And if we want to avoid unnecessary arguments it advises us ‘not to be weird about how to stack the dishwasher.’ It says that ‘we should always be willing to miss the next train,’ we should always ‘ask questions and then take care to listen to the answers.’ For foodies, it advises that ‘we should eat salted butter, because life’s too short to waste on the unsalted sort.’  And more seriously, we should try to ‘buy secondhand’, we should write to our MP whenever s...

2 Peter 1:12-21 Whether the writer is the real Peter, or just someone writing from his point of view, he claims to  be the older Peter living in Rome just before he was put to death for following Jesus. People often say, as they get older, that time seems to fly by faster and become more precious. It’s not an original idea. It’s what the writer says here. Memories become more important with age too. We have so many of them and they become ever more precious the further away in time they get. There is always the fear of losing our memories, or indeed of losing the ability to remember. For the original eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life and work there was a desperate anxiety to pass on their memories of him and make sure they were cherished.  It’s fashionable to say that the Christian story is a ‘clever made-up story’ only loosely based on the real life of Jesus. But this isn’t a new claim. The writer of 2 Peter talks about it here. He affirms that the Christian story is based on real ...

Luke 15.11-24 Have you ever realised that you've done something wrong? That you’ve hurt someone else? Perhaps you didn’t mean to. Perhaps you didn’t really care how they felt at the time. Perhaps you hurt them on purpose. But then you felt sorry and wanted to put things right. Did you manage to do that? The only way to really put things right is to say sorry. And we can also tell God that we’re sorry and that we want to do better. Saying sorry isn’t easy, though, is it? It can go wrong.  Have you ever used the word ‘But’ in an apology? I know I have. ‘I’m sorry but…’ The people who ran the Post Office have practised different 'buts' and excuses when they tried to explain the huge miscarriage of justice which saw hundreds of subpostmasters bankrupted or imprisoned. And Boris Johnson had a lot of practice at this. ‘I’m sorry we had a party during Lockdown, but we had all been working very hard.’ We should never use ‘but’ when we say sorry because it suggests we’re not complet...

Luke 10.21-37 We often read the parable of the Good Samaritan in isolation, as if it were a self-contained story. But it isn’t. It belongs in a specific context in St Luke’s Gospel. We know this from the way it begins: ‘Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus.’ Just when exactly does the lawyer stand up, though? Just after Jesus has said, ‘I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.’ In private to his disciples he has also said, ‘Many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.’ Just then up pops the lawyer. Granted that he would not have been party to the private aside to Jesus’ disciples about important people desiring to see and yet not seeing what is now being revealed to little children, it would still be pretty brazen for anyone to try to test Jesus ab...

Psalm 1, Proverbs 31.10-31, James 3.13-18, Mark 9.33-37  The  Psalmist assumes  that all of us are constantly being encouraged to follow the advice of the wicked. The task of the believer is to resist that advice, and instead to follow God’s way. We might think that it’s easy to resist the advice of the wicked. But just think about advertising, which insidiously encourages us to want new things. We might think, for instance, that we will try not to buy new clothes because manufacturing cloth does a lot of damage to the environment. But then along come the adverts! The wicked are people who encourage us to go against our better judgement, to make unwise and godless choices. And when they’re not trying to influence us to do the wrong thing, the Psalmist says that the wicked are scoffing at believers for trying to do the right thing. The last US election illustrates what the Psalmist means, although the sharp contrast between the wicked and the believers doesn...

Genesis 3:16–24; 4:1–16 Today's passages talk about the consequences of sin. In summary, sin - separation from a right relationship with God - leads to conflict with other human beings. Partnership is replaced by competitiveness and attempts to dominate one another. The easy mutually caring relationship which Adam and Eve enjoyed when they were good friends with God is replaced by male domination and patriarchal control. And farmers are soon at odds with nomadic herders. Their self regarding attitudes bring Adam and Eve into conflict with  Nature too. Eve seems to find childbirth more difficult, perhaps because she can no longer count on loving support - at least from her husband. Adam seems to find farming more difficult, perhaps because he now sets out to subdue nature instead of working sympathetically with it. And Cain the nomadic herder is soon in conflict with Abel, the settled farmer, after his offering to God is rejected. We don't know why this was. Perhaps his motives ...

Isaiah 24.1-13, Romans 8.9-24 We sometimes imagine that the challenges which we face today are entirely new. And some are, of course. No previous generations have had to confront the emergence of artificial intelligence or the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  But what about environmental challenges like the ones caused by global warming and the proliferation of dangerous, untested chemicals in our kitchens, our water supply and the air we breathe? These have never been seen before on a global scale, but they're not entirely new. The first Easter Islanders laid waste their environment by cutting down all the trees. Their civilization collapsed and they were driven out, leaving behind some really impressive statues. The Old Testament passage we read today is attributed to the prophet we know as First Isaiah but it is actually a fragment of poetry of unknown origin which the editors of the Book of Isaiah have woven into their collection of his prophecies because it seems to fit the ...

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...