Gospel Luke 9 28-43 Just for a change today, I have a couple of visual aids. Some of you have seen one of them before, during our Bible studies. A veil and a stool! Thirty years before I was ordained, I probably wouldn’t have been able to be ordained. Not because of my working-class background or my then lack of formal education (though they were still a barrier in my own day) but because I am epileptic. Now probably there are quite a lot of you who don’t even know that I hav

Gospel Luke 8: 22-25 The Church of England lectionary, in its desire to prepare us for Lent, this week reminds us of the Creation, and more specifically God’s ultimate creativity and control over nature. In our first two readings, we see God as creator, of the author of all life including mankind, we see God as the supreme being, worshipped and adored by all that is. Our Gospel fits well into that pattern; here we have a lake, a storm and Jesus in ultimate control and authori

Gospel Luke 6:17-26. The central part of our Gospel passage today is one of the most famous and perhaps best loved passages in the New Testament. We call the collection of phrases the Beatitudes, so called because of the meaning of the first word of each line, blessing - or rather blessed, meaning in context, blessed are you, with a clarifying phrase following. “Blessed are you if ….” is the formula. A set of conditions leading to a blessing. But there is a phrase in that Gos

To many people in the world at large, what we are doing here this morning is a waste of time. Some of course may value the music, or the companionship or a few other things. But the religious elements of what we are doing, the liturgy, the prayer is at worst misguided at best a psychological prop. Many people find their fulfilment in other religious, social and or cultural activities. Perhaps sometimes, if we are totally honest, we might feel like that too. Do I need to be in