Q&A: Who were the first disciples? (Peter, etc. but what do they all have in common? … Yes, they were fishers, yes, they were men, yes, they followed without hesitation, but perhaps above all they were Galileans. People of the Galilee.) Imagine, with me, Jesus emerging from the desert where he has been since his …
Author Archives: Rob
Sunday Week 2 Year A
“Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” It’s struck me this week as I’ve thought about this phrase that I really haven’t thought much about it before: just taken it for granted as another strange thing in John’s gospel—which is full of strange things. It’s also been easy to …
Epiphany Sunday Year A
(Enter messenger hurriedly …) Lord Balthasar! (Hands over a scroll … B reads, ponders, dismisses the messenger, puts down the scroll, turns to congregation ) Buried with a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes … I had almost forgotten him … God knows I’ve tried! Nothing has been quite right since that fool’s errand thirty …
Sunday Week 4 of Advent Year A
Have you ever trusted a dream enough to act on it when you wake up? I don’t know about you but some of the things I dream about are not fit for the light of day. We do things in dreams we just wouldn’t dream of doing in daylight. And most of our dreams don’t …
December 17
“It was the best of times and the worst of times…” that’s the way to start a book. “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit” isn’t bad either, though my favourite is probably, “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” From out here in front I could see …
Sunday Week 3 of Advent Year A
John has never been a patient man. It’s not patience that drives you to take up the prophet’s staff, the hair shirt and the disgusting diet. It’s not patience that drives you out among the desert’s ravines to rave over the coming destruction. It’s not patience that has you mouthing off to all- comers about …
Sunday Week 1 Of Advent Year A
Maltravers Herald Extraordinary, Portcullis Pursuivant, Silver Stick in Waiting. No they’re not race horses. Just good signs of Advent. According to this morning’s papers the Clinton case continues to ooze on, tangled in its trails of weaselly rhetoric; Germany continues to agonise over the Holocaust and the place of memory and shame in its present; …
Christ the King Year C
Pardon the distance — but I thought that given the subject matter this morning it was safer. I’ve been slapped across the face only once in my life and that was at the end of a conversation —I should probably say an argument — that I started by saying “You can’t be a real Christian …
Friday Week 32 Year II
They were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on that day it rained fire and sulphur from heaven and destroyed all of them—it will be like that on the day that the Son of Man is revealed. Whew! Don’t you wish we could skip these bits and just get on to …
Sunday Week 32 Year C
The following excerpts are taken from the pamphlet “The Eden Virus” written by Adam Child-Of-God five years ago in 2022. No one imagined, when the so-called millennium swine flu began its spread around the globe in late 1999, that its impact would be as great as it was. Indeed experts paid scant attention to the …