Sharing some thoughts

  It is wonderful, however many of us there are, to gather together in worship… And it’s wonderful in our services to pray together and praise God together, to hear words from the bible, to sing together…   It’s wonderful to do things like reciting the creed where we proclaim our belief in God who made heaven and earth, who sent his Son, to live with us and to die for us, but who rose again from the dead, to reveal and offer the promise of new life…  And we are hopefully reminded in our worship of how awesome God is! When we think of God’s power and also love for us, we can begin to recognise the transformation that his power and his love bring…  It is all incredible, but the church today often seems to be lacking in confidence and that is a problem when we are telling people about God who changes us and can change the world; God, who created; God, who loves so powerfully; God, who in Jesus performed miracles including the conquering of death – the list can go o...

  Many of you will know the song, ‘You raise me up’. The verse that’s repeated in it says,   ‘ You raise me up so I can stand on mountains You raise me up to walk on stormy seas I am strong when I am on Your shoulders You raise me up to more than I can be ’    It’s a powerful song because it reminds us of a strength which sometimes seems beyond us, but that we know is there, and finding the person or the thing that gives us that strength is crucial… And that begins with God, and when I looked at the gospel reading this morning, this song came to mind, because the reading is about lifting people up to be the people God wants them and us to be… And that is more than we can ever be through our own strength alone.    The  reading (Luke 6:17-26)  was  an account of the beatitudes. The beatitudes are also told in a bit more length in the gospel according to Matthew, but today we hear from Luke. We don’t know whether it is an account of the same spe...

  Sometimes when I’m looking through the readings for a particular service, some phrases or even words just pop out and when I was thinking about this morning, that happened a lot !   And I want to think of three of them this morning – one from each of our readings. From the Old Testament reading (Isaiah 6:1-8) we hear of God calling, ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us?’ and Isaiah responds, ‘Here am I send me’.  From Paul’s 1 st letter to the Corinthians (15: 1-11), ‘By the grace of God, I am what I am’, and finally from the gospel (Luke 5:1-11), Jesus said, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ So, three verses but each of them, I think, linked together, and each are relevant to us now. There’s a true account which is used in the diocesan welcome course, ‘Croeso’, which recounts the experiences of Nicky Cruz who would go on to become a gang leader in New York, when he arrived in the city as a teenager from Puerto Rico. It says,  ...