Sharing some thoughts

From Helen This morning is one of those mornings for a preacher when you wish that you weren’t preaching. It is a morning when you could easily confuse people, a morning when basically you could end up being a heretic as you try and explain how God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit but is still one God. Yes this morning is an important day. It isn’t Christmas, it isn’t Easter it isn’t even my birthday !! Today is the day when we celebrate that God amazing wants to be in a relationship with us. A day when we give thanks that God has shown Himself to us in so many ways because He is all around us and He loves us. Today is confusing, as we try to work out how God can be three in one and one in three. There are lots of   different ways that we can view the Trinity. The first is that in the same way that H2O can be running water, steam and ice so God can show Himself to us as Creator, Redeemer and Comforter. In the same way that a transformer toy is one toy but can be a robot, a car...

Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday, it’s a special day but unusual because today we don’t celebrate the life of a Saint or a particular event but we celebrate a belief, or put more technically, a doctrine…  And w ith those words I can almost hear the sound of people dropping off to sleep, but I hope you won’t because the Trinity is all about life and energy and love, it’s about creation and power and salvation…. And it’s about you and me and how we enjoy a relationship with God…  T he doctrine of the Trinity – God, three persons yet one God, is a confusing one but our lack of understanding doesn’t lessen the importance. St Augustine wrote as far back as the 4 th  century that any God who  we can understand is not God…  In the most simple of terms  of course  God the Father is the creator of the world, God the Son is the person we know as Jesus, who came into the world to save us from sin and to offer a direct route back to God, and God the Holy S...

From Helen Well I want to start by thinking of our celebrations today. We are celebrating the beginning of the Church  as we think of the feast of Pen tecost and we will be celebrating the confirmation of  Chris who has said yes to God by  being baptised and last week by being confirmed.  Today is all about lives being changed. It is amazing to think of Pentecost as the birth of the Church. This is because it was on the day of Pentecost that the group of Jesus’s followers were able to tell even more people about Jesus and the way that He had changed their li ves, on the day of Pentecost many  more people joined the followers of Jesus a nd so the Church was born as it  started to grow.  When people encounter Jesus their lives are changed. Today is about celebrating and we will be doing that afterwards but it reminds me of something that happened to me when I was in University.  I n  Uni versity  I  was a member of the Christi...

On a course this week I was told that the amount of information that each of us process daily on average has doubled in the past 20 years. We were also told that the brain often filters out things that we don’t need to know. For example driving here this morning I must have passed many cars but I don’t really remember them, but I would have if one of those cars had done something strange or something that directly affected me – the ones that didn’t were just filtered out by my brain…  You’ll probably be grateful to know that I’m not going to give you a full summary of the course but it did make me think about what we regard as useful information whether consciously or sub-consciously, and with that question, where does our faith stand ?  Today we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, one of the great Feasts of the Church calendar as we remember the gift of the Holy Spirit being given to the early followers and to all who have followed since…  In our reading from...

I heard a quote this week that Jesus loved people until they knew they were loved... As we come to the end of the Easter season in the church calendar we're reminded of the victory of the cross, of the power and love of a risen Saviour, and we're invited to respond to that love firstly with a recognition of that love for us and secondly by seeking to share that love with others.  John’s gospel from which we heard this morning (15:9-17) is a powerful evangelistic gospel. Throughout, the writer encourages its readers to go out and witness to God – John backs up his writing by describing the public miracles that Jesus did – it is John also who gives us the famous ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus – I am the bread of life; the light of the world; the door; the good shepherd; the resurrection and the life; the way, the truth and the life and the vine.  The miracles and these sayings of Jesus point us to the fact that we are to be confident in God – we can trust that Jesus came into the wo...