Your creation, my creation, our creation,
science’s creation, God’s creation
Whoever, whenever, whatever
One thing’s for sure
It is a marvellous creation
Full of vibration
Full of attraction
Full of energy
Full of parallels and opposites
Natural laws, manmade laws, religious laws,
spiritual laws
One thing’s for sure
It’s a wonderful mystery
slowly being unfolded
Some feel they have all the answers
Some are still searching and others are
just not interested
A magnetic equilibrium of antitheses
Life and death
Day and night
Positive and negative
Richly abundant and barrenly dry
All exist
While we wonder, why, why, why???
Rurkinder-Kaur Sidhu. Kim10@min.com

When I was growing up, the word ‘cosmos’ wasn’t part of my vocabulary. We heard ‘universe’ and ‘galaxy’ spoken of in relation to the world around us – and those ideas were challenging enough to get your head around. My particular world – and yours – has expanded in more directions than one during my lifetime. We were told in high school that electrons and protons were the smallest particles. Now we know that’s not true. And, as the known particles of creation get smaller and smaller, the cosmos gets larger and larger. Everything is constantly on the move. The stars we see in our night sky are not the stars that our first ancestors saw. I still remember an astronomer friend of mine telling me that she always quite enjoyed telling people who believed in astrology, and who rang the National Observatory to get advice from astronomers, that they were a month out of date with their star signs. That’s how far things have moved in the hundreds of years since people began to tell their fortunes from the signs of the zodiac, never mind how far they’ve moved in the thousands of years of human history. Continue reading Cosmos and Catholicity – Creation →

Jeremiah 4: 11-12, 22-28

We read two sections from Jeremiah this morning and, the section in-between that is missed out, gives imagery to the Babylonian invasion.  In an interesting twist the blame for the invasion is placed with the invaded rather than the invaders.  This is real social comment where it is understood that bad national policy makes invasion a real possibility.  The second part of this morning’s reading is a lament over the devastation caused by the invasion. and Maurice Andrew points especially to the line in the second half of verse 25.

‘And all the birds of the air had fled.’ Which reminded him of a character created by the New Zealand author Owen Marshall who was ‘so tough that the birds stop singing as he passes’.  ^[1] Continue reading Lost and Found →

04 September 2022

We’ve just moved into the season of Creation. It’s a newish season of the church year, but it has rapidly become an urgently important season. It’s intended to be a time when we deliberately make connections between our interpretation of Scripture and our awareness of “creation.” This isn’t something we do easily because most of us have inherited traditional ways of reading and interpreting scripture through the lens of our humanity. This is, we focus on the personal – (what does this passage say to me) and also social justice. The Season of Creation challenges us to reconfigure our thought patterns and to ask: “How does this passage affect my attitude towards the Earth and all its inhabitants?”

The season began on September 1 – Creation Day, and today is Ocean Sunday. But I needed to start at the beginning because of those amazing images coming to us from the James Webb telescope. We are getting images that have travelled through billions of years – thousands of millions of years. From before the time when our planet first came together. It’s hard – no it’s impossible to comprehend the time scale. My brain can’t cope with more than a few millennia. I know that life began on this planet hundreds of thousands of years ago, but I can’t easily grasp these timespans, let alone the cosmic ones! Continue reading Creation’s Challenges. →

A sermon on Luke 14: 1, 7-14. . August 28 2022

Luke’s Jesus sometimes seems to be preoccupied with meals. There are more references to eating, banquets, tables and reclining at tables than in any of the other Gospels.  Luke suggests that, for Jesus, the table is a key place for teaching, and for encountering the marginalized. Jesus also uses the meal table as a focus for some of his parables. Sharing a meal, sitting round a table, is a principal site for fellowship and for teaching. So, here we go again, with a meal within a meal.

On the surface, this looks like a straightforward little story. Don’t ever assume that you have a right to the place of honour. It’s not status that counts, it’s service. You may think you are important – but that won’t necessarily be the way God sees your rȏle. That’s the obvious message of this little parable that Jesus told. It’s the upside-down kingdom again – and let’s be quite clear about this – it’s seditious stuff. In Jesus’ world, status was important and status underpinned the established authority. This is Mary’s song all over again: ‘He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts……… he has brought down the powerful from their seats, and exalted the humble and meek.’ We’re so familiar with this theme, and possibly with this story, that we can slide over the provocation, but be very sure that his fellow dinner guests would have got the point. Continue reading Open Tables →