Sharing some thoughts

I hope this isn’t one of them but I am sure that all of us must have, at some time or another, gone to a Church service which we really haven’t enjoyed – perhaps the music was too loud, too quiet, too modern, too old, the preaching was too long or too short, perhaps boring as well, or the building was cold and the people at the service were just as bad ! When we leave a service like that we sometimes have a tendency to moan ! But what one person moans about, another may well treasure, and both would be being completely honest… There can be things we do wrong in our worship certainly, but some things simply come down to taste…. And in our gospel reading today (Mark 9:38-50) we have a reminder that there really is no right and wrong when people are honestly serving Jesus and seeking to share his message. In the reading John brings it to the attention of Jesus that someone is going around casting out demons and using the name of Jesus to do it.. As he is not part of the established group...

From Helen When I looked at the gospel reading (Mark 9:38-50) for this morning a song kept playing around in my mind which I think sums up a lot of what was  in the reading.   Some words from the song are:-  We can't go on together With suspicious minds  And we can't build our dreams On suspicious minds Does anyone recognise these words ? They are of course from the song Suspicious Minds which was sung by Elvis. These words came to my mind because in the gospel we heard of the disciples telling Jesus about a man who was worrying them. This man was casting out demons in the name of Jesus.  The person wasn’t known to the disciples and so they asked Jesus about the man.  This may seem understandable to us. It is hard to tell what they were most concerned about was it that if this man wanted to be like Jesus then why wasn’t He following in the same way that they were ? Or were they thinking why was this man doing all this ? Was he tr...

Today’s collect is one of the best I think – just a reminder of the beginning, ‘Almighty God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you: teach us to offer ourselves to your service, that here we may have peace….’  This morning I want to think a bit about those words… Created by God, we are not complete until we really connect with him and service him, and when we do that we will know his peace… So what is it to really know  God ?  W hat does serving God look  like ? Our gospel reading (Mark 9:30-37) describes a great journey – Jesus had been in the north of his country in Caesarea Philippi and was now travelling south through Galilee. It was a journey he would have done before but  this time was special as he was heading  to Jerusalem to die.   We are told that this was to  be  a quiet journey, he didn’t want crowds of people – in many ways his  public earthly ministry was nearing...

from Helen I have a reputation, that I think may be unfair that I talk too much. To be honest my favourite things are words. You can make sense of life when you have words in front of you. Words are one of our best forms of communication. There was once an elderly lady who was well-known for her faith and for her boldness in talking about it. She would stand by her front door and shout "PRAISE THE LORD!" Next door to her lived an atheist who would get so angry at her proclamations he would shout, "There isn’t a Lord!!" Hard times set in on the elderly lady, and she prayed for GOD to send her some assistance. She stood by her front door and shouted "PRAISE THE LORD. GOD I NEED FOOD!! I AM HAVING A HARD TIME. PLEASE LORD, SEND ME SOME GROCERIES!!" The next morning the lady went out of her front door and noted a large bag of groceries and shouted, "PRAISE THE LORD." The neighbour jumped from behind a bush and said, "Ah! I told ...

from Helen  Sometimes in life we are caught out by children, they have a habit of remembering everything and so occasionally they will come out with something you didn’t even think they had heard. This happened to one man as he was travelling home from Church with his wife and son in the car. The man moaned all the way home - first he moaned about the sermon, then he got angry about the traffic, then he complained about the heat, and when they all got home he made a big fuss about how late his lunch was served ! After all this he bowed his head and prayed, giving God thanks for the food. His son as they all went to eat asked, “Daddy, did God hear you when we left the church and you started moaning about the sermon and about the traffic and about the heat?” The father was just a little awkward as he answered, “Well, yes, son, He heard me.” “Well, Daddy, did God hear you when you just prayed for this food right now?” Talk about being caught out - the man answered, “Well, yes He...

The readings for the last couple of weeks have challenged us to make some difficult decisions about commitment, and today the readings do exactly the same thing. For the last couple of weeks we have thought about Jesus’ claim to be the Bread of Life or the Living Bread, and today he continues to challenge his listeners as he talks of the bread that came down from heaven (John 6:56-69).   Once again Jesus is saying that people must make a choice for him or against him, and that choice has to be to fully immerse ourselves in him, recognising that we will get it wrong sometimes... In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (6:10-20), he is urging his listeners to make a choice, just as he had made a choice. The choice there was whether they were willing to stand as soldiers in God’s army in a spiritual war. In our often rather mixed up world it’s often easier to just sit on the fence, leaving decisions for others and I think on many occasions that is just what the Church has trie...

A few years ago on holiday Helen and I found some of those shapes of people where you put your head into a hole and suddenly have the body of a muscleman or a pirate or any number of other things. They were often associated with seafronts and fairgrounds and whilst they’re seen less often now, they remain quite amusing because the head so often doesn’t look right on the body below. I heard an illustration once which asked what it would look like if Jesus put his head on his followers – on what we call the Body of Christ. Would it look like an amusing misfit or not ? For the last few weeks we’ve heard a lot about bread – last week we had Jesus saying, ‘I am the bread of life’, the week before that we heard of how he spoke to a crowd about the true bread from heaven, giving life to the world, and the week before that we had the account of feeding the 5,000. There are really no bread analogies left to use in sermons and I often wonder why all these bread readings come so close togethe...