Sharing some thoughts

  Readings:  1 Kings 8:22-30, Psalm 122, Hebrews 12:18-24, Matthew 21:12-16 What makes a house into a home? At first sight, the answer seems straightforward. A house is a physical structure. It is made of bricks and mortar, stone and wood, glass and plaster. You can measure its size, calculate its value and describe its features. But none of those things really makes it a home. A home is created by the life lived within it. It is formed through years of shared experience: family meals and celebrations, conversations and laughter, moments of sadness and moments of joy. A home is where memories are made and relationships grow. That distinction between a house and a home helps us understand what we are doing when we celebrate a church dedication festival. A church building is, of course, a building. It may be admired for its architecture, valued for its history and cared for with great devotion. Yet what makes a church precious is ultimately the life of prayer, worship and servic...

  I wonder who has had the greatest influence on your faith - perhaps a parent or grandparent whose faith quietly shaped your own or a Sunday school teacher, a priest, a friend, or perhaps somebody who never realised just how much they encouraged you simply by the way they lived. Often, the people who have the greatest impact on our lives are not the people standing at the very centre of the story. Yet without them, things would have been very different. Luke is one of those people. Luke was not one of the Twelve Apostles, not among those first disciples who left their fishing nets to follow Jesus. As far as we know, he was not present for the feeding of the five thousand, the Transfiguration, or the crucifixion itself. He was a physician, and someone who came to know Jesus after the resurrection. And yet, much of what we know about Jesus comes through Luke's work. Without Luke we would not have the story of the Good Samaritan, nor the Prodigal Son. We would not have Zacchaeus clim...

  One of the realities of life is that we are often much better at noticing what is wrong than noticing what is right. We can live in a warm and comfortable home and complain about the room that needs decorating. We can have a fridge full of food and still wonder what there is to eat. We can have plenty of clothes and still think we have nothing suitable to wear. We can have lots of good things happening in our lives and yet spend a surprising amount of time worrying about the things that aren't going quite as we would like them to. Perhaps that is one reason why Harvest is such a valuable occasion. For one Sunday in the year, we are encouraged to stop and notice the things we often take for granted. Whether or not we have brought gifts today, Harvest reminds us that food does not simply appear on supermarket shelves. Behind every meal are farmers and growers, people who transport food, process it and sell it. Behind all of that is the remarkable world God has created, with its soi...

  Genesis 28.10-17; Revelation 12.7-12; John 1.47-51 "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it."  (Genesis 28:16) Those words of Jacob which we heard in the Old Testament reading have echoed through many centuries because they capture an experience that many people recognise. We often assume that God is present in the obviously holy places  such as  churches,  or  in prayer, in worship ,  in those moments when faith seems clear and strong. Yet life  doesn’t always work like that . We  can  find ourselves in places of uncertainty, disappointment, anxiety or loss, and it becomes much harder to believe that God is  near . Yet the surprising message of  the Bible  is that God often chooses those very moments to make himself known.  Again  and again people discover that God was present long before they recognised him. Heaven is closer to earth than they imagined. That, I think, is the theme that runs th...