Sharing some thoughts

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...

from Helen I sometimes feel that I may be a bit too honest with you all. You know rather a lot about me including my love of chocolate and unhealthy food. Lest you think that I am not that healthy when I eat I do eat rather well in a healthy manner however I do stray very often. This was made real to me one time when I was talking to a group of year 5 children (9-10 year olds) and they asked me what my favourite food was. N ow I know about children and he a l thy eating so I commented that I really liked chicken. I may have mentioned how yummy a roast dinner with vegetables can be. It was all going well until they asked me what my favourite meal of all was… I did  it !  I admitted that it was McDonalds Chicken selects with fries. I heard giggles and some children shook their heads telling me that this was not a healthy  meal ! I was thinking about this when I looked at our gospel reading (John 6:51-58) for this morning. In our reading we heard more about Jesus as b...

I’ve told this story before, but I think it’s a good one and one that  can offer us some real encouragement and perhaps a little challenge  in our Christian lives.  The  theologian S oren  Kierkegaard  wrote   about a  community of ducks waddling off to duck church to hear the duck preacher …  At the service, t he duck preacher spoke eloquently of how God had given the ducks wings with which to fly. With these wings there was nowhere the ducks could not go. With those wings they could soar  high into the sky .. . Shouts of "Amen!" were quacked throughout the duck congregation  and there was real excitement at the wonderful gifts that God had given them. A t the conclusion of the service, the ducks left commenting on the  wonderful and amazing   message …  and  then  they  waddled back home – but  they never flew. They talked about God’s wonderful gifts, but they never used them…  Using th...

from Helen I once heard about an occasion when a man claimed that he had photographic evidence that Elvis was still alive. He phoned a newspaper and the news quickly spread. The excited media went to see this man so they could see the picture. When they arrived the man showed them the photograph. They looked and said, ‘this is a photo of you and your dog, not Elvis.’  The man replied, ‘yes, but Elvis took the picture.’ Sometimes we can be mistaken. One of my worst mistakes was when a woman was proudly showing me the new ring that her husband had bought her. The stone was very clear and so on looking she asked me to guess what stone it was. I said cubic zirconia which is a fake diamond. The problem was that the  ring actually was a diamond ring ! Thankfully she didn’t hear me but .. Sometimes the things that seem real aren’t. This morning in our gospel reading (John 6:51-58) we heard of Jesus showing that He was not an imitation or a copy. Jesus didn’t say that He wa...