John 11: 1 - 45        The Raising of Lazarus

This Sunday is Passion Sunday, the start of two weeks in which we enter more intensely into the suffering of Christ, leading to the joy and hope of Easter Day

In a carefully detailed narrative, t...

Today the secular world and the Church combine in saying thank you for the mothers among us and for all those: men and women; old and young who have the ability to mother others when that is most needed. I suppose that is at the root of the two names we have for this d...

[Exodus 24, 12-18, 2 Peter 1, 16-21, Matthew 17, 1-9] I have been thinking quite a lot recently about the different ways in which we handle the concept and the fact of Time.  Is it as linear as we tend to assume? 

This was provoked partly by a friend’s comment that...

[Malachi 4:1-2; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19] I think it is true to say that there is quite a lot of anxiety around these days fueled partly by worries over climate change, the political and economic future of our country and other uncertainties magnified in ou...

(Numbers 9:15-end; 1 Corinthians 7:17-24) “Whenever the cloud lifted from over the tent, then the Israelites would set out; and in the place where the cloud settled down, there the Israelites would camp. At the command of the Lord the Israelites would set out, and at t...

(Luke 3.15-17, 21-22 ) Some years ago, a friend went on holiday to Jerusalem. He brought me back a memento – it was an old lemon-squash bottle, half-full of murky fluid. I asked what it was, and he solemnly told me that he’d brought me water from the River Jordan. I wa...

(Daniel 5; John 6:1-15) 

"I sat upon the shore fishing, with the arid plains behind me 

Shall I at least set my lands in order? "

(Lines from T S Eliot’s The Waste Land) 

If Eliot’s words are enigmatic, then ambiguous is the designation of Christ as king.  Here is one...

(Hebrews 9:24-end; Mark 1:14-22) “After John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.”  Good news!  We could do with a bit more of that.  Because there is an awful lot of bad news around at the moment.  There always is, but it seems especi...

It can be hard to talk about.  Because there is an inner hurt we’d rather not reveal.  And we don’t want to put other people in an embarrassing situation – even those who are most sympathetic.  And of course they don’t really know what to say.  And don’t want to upset...

Why, you may justifiably ask, should the feast of Sts Simon and Jude remind me of a very popular children’s show from the mid 1950s until the 1980s called Crackerjack!?

I remember watching Crackerjack hosted early on by Eamonn Andrews on black and white tv with my siste...