Sharing some thoughts

From Helen May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy  Spirit. AMEN I love stories, I love the excitement of characters and working out what might happen to different people. I can’t understand people who read the end of a novel first to see whether it is worth reading the rest of the book.  This  morning  I want to  tell  you a story that is not a novel but is actually true and this is the story of Esther from whose book we heard this morning. Esther was a queen she did lots of great things, she protected her people and their faith and she did it all through prayer and faithfulness.  The story is good but what it means for us is even better. So please sit back and enjoy the tale of Esther … The story of Esther began around 479BC.  She was a Jewish girl living in exile in Persia.  The King whose name was Xerxes had a disagreement with his wife Vashti and so decided that he needed to find a new wife. See – Henry VIII was not ...

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 went 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 the end… But Jesus did have things to do, and most importantly of all was to try and prepare his followers for what was to come, and so he told them that he was going to be arrested and killed, that he would die but on the third day would rise again… And the disciples didn’t understand. And, on the journey, we are told the disciples argued but when Jesus asked them what they argued about, they wouldn’t say because they were ashamed to say that they had been arguing about who was the most important of them… As Jesus spoke of his arrest and death and resurrection, they...

from Helen Words, words, words – there are so many of them about. It is true that we all know a lot of words and use a very small amount of those words. Words have a stronger power than we can ever think. After all communication is key. How we communicate is a way to express the type of people we are. An elderly lady was well-known for her faith and for her boldness in talking about it. She would stand on her front porch 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 on her porch 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 on her porch and noted a large bag of groceries and shouted, "PRAISE THE LORD." The neighbour jumped from behind a...

Today’s gospel reading (Mark 7:24-37) gives us the account of a persistent woman begging Jesus to heal her daughter. We are told that the daughter had an unclean spirit, perhaps today we may recognise it as something like epilepsy, but whatever it was it was damaging her life. And so the mother approached Jesus who initially seemed to reject her. But she persisted and eventually her daughter was healed. And so in a way this just goes down as another miracle of Jesus, but actually there is a little more to this account as well. The first thing to look at was the attitude of the mother. This was a very pushy woman - perhaps the sort of ardent feminist found on a bus one day. When she was getting on a man just in front of her got up from his seat. She thought to herself, "Here's another man trying to keep up the customs of a patriarchal society by offering a poor, defenceless woman his seat," and so she pushed him back onto the seat. 
 A few minutes later, the man t...