New Kid on the Blog

 I think I might have been overconfident about getting two reviews done quickly! It's been a busy couple of weeks, with some heavy stuff to deal with, but I did get Zach's book read! What a delight this book is! Really worth five stars - it's accessible, written with clarity and depth, there's a warmth about it that is engaging and encouraging.  Zach reminds us (because many of those who claim to be Christian don't believe it) that we all read the Bible through interpretative lenses. I grew up in a Church tradition which thought that it read the Bible in the 'right' way - that the interpretation given by the pastor was the only way we should look at Scripture. As soon as I started studying Theology I realized how many different ways the Bible is read - and that more often than not, more is read INTO the Bible than actually comes from Scripture.  'better ways...' looks at three of the lenses which are used in many Churches and which cause hurt and har...

Another sermon - as seems to be the way of this blog at present! Life is busy and complicated, and good, and bad, and exciting, and challenging, and (in short) not conducive to getting Blog posts written! So, here's my thought for today taken from these passages (Click for details): Exodus 16:1–5, 9–15,  Psalm 78;18–29 Mt 13.1–9 Grace and Meaning In the words of St Paul, or perhaps St John, or maybe St George, or even St Ringo “When I was younger, so much younger than today.” Ah, sorry, couldn’t resist!  No, it’s not a tubby boy story – but just a general reflection that today’s story from the book of Exodus used to cause me great consternation.  Or at least was one of those parts of Scripture that didn’t seem to fit… I knew the story, the mythological story I am now convinced, of the temptations in the wilderness when Jesus proclaims, quoting Deuteronomy 6 ‘you shall not put the Lord your God to the test’. As I moved into the Anglican Church and ...

So, what is the nature of scripture? Hmmm, good question - and one I have been struggling with for most of my adult life, as I have journeyed through many differing traditions and ended up very much within the liberal, broad part of the church! I wonder if sometimes our approach to the Bible is somewhat like a misheard song lyric, every now and then we stop and say 'oh, so that's what it says'.  So here's some Peter Kay with some amusing misheard song lyrics (there's a few rude bits, so don't watch if easily offended)  I riffed off of this for today's sermon at St John the Divine, Victoria - as you'll tell if you listen to the podomatic link below, some of it I stole (acknowledged) wholesale, and then moved on to considering exactly what we are doing when we encounter 'bad' bible bits!

Of course, having made reference to my Sunday Sermon in the previous blog post, I really should post that too... God is nowhere?

So, I'm not a theological conservative.  That probably comes across in pretty much everything I write, but I thought I should say it.  I believe myself to be orthodox, however, and hold to those things which the Church expresses in the catholic creeds.  I also have a relatively 'high' theology regarding the inspiration of Scripture. But I am not a Biblical literalist, nor do I hold to a doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture. I can't.  The Bible is too rich, too deep, too difficult, too flawed for that.  And by flawed I mean I understand it to be the record of human beings trying to make sense of God at work.  It has the breath of the Spirit blowing through it's words and on every page, but when we try and make sense of God there is a chance we will go awry.... 'Hey lets condemn (and or murder) pretty much everyone who isn't in our tribe, that's obviously what God wants' kind of awry.  And if we study this book carefully then we see that ideas ...

Here's my Parish Mag ' View from the Vicarage ' for October explaining why we're embarking on this Big Bible week that's got me all agitated and enthusiastic... If someone offered you a gift that promised eternal life, that unfolded the deepest truth and that shared the wisdom and love of the creator of the universe with you, would you want it?   If you were freely given something that could change your life, and change the world around you for the better would you accept something like that? Well, we do have something like that – we have our Scriptures, the Holy Bible.   The Bible is God’s direct communication with us, it is source of our faith, our life, our hope, our truth and it within it’s covers, as the Thirty-Nine articles of the Church of Englad say, it “containeth all things necessary to salvation.” It takes some work, though.   There are ‘strings attached’.   Our Bibles need to be read, to be thought about, to be wrestled with. ...

Oy vey, again with the long gaps - yep, despite my very best intentions, blogging seems to have slipped of the radar for some time again.  I have been brought back to it by some level of excitement over a forthcoming set of events happening in our Mission Community which make up our 'Mission Week' - our Big Bible Celebration . For a bit more detail here's some of a publicity email I put out earlier in the week that sums it up as well as I could as if I tried to write it all out again.... We want our 'Big Bible Week' to be a time of building up disciples as well as attracting people to hear the message who might not normally come. As such we have used the 'hook' of the 400th Anniversary of the publishing of the AV but we are celebrating the gift of Scripture as a whole, and particularly the Bible in readable, accessible form for us.  We are calling this the 'Big Bible' week - Attached is a pdf poster of all that's going on, ...

Made it! OK, so you're sick of seeing all the books in my library and I'm kind of out of ideas, so its pretty much a good thing that NaBloPoMo is over! The best is saved for last It's a bit of a cheat saying the Bible really - not so much a book as a library. Also having this as my book of the day might make me look a bit of a holier-than- thou type - but please let me assure you that I am holier than nobody! The amazing thing about the Bible, well one of the amazing things about the Bible, is that there's no end to it. By that I mean you could read it again and again and see new stuff all the time. I do believe God speaks through the Bible, sometimes as much through the stuff that is all mixed up in culture and misunderstanding (I'm pretty sure there's a fair amount of that in there) as the stuff which is clearer and more obvious. It's a lifetiime study, and the meaning only really comes out when we do the reading in partnership with God. But that...

Still going, and haven't got to any books I want to read yet... until now, that is, so I can't review it, so any comments, thoughts on this would be welcome... I like Adrian Plass, faithful, funny and fairly thought provoking (couldn't think of any more alliterations there). So is his take on the Bible going to be worth reading? He tends to retain a fairly conservative theology whilst being willing to take a few risks with what he says, so perhaps this book will be challenging, or perhaps it will be a way of trying to explain bits of the Bible that don't fit with retaining a conservative viewpoint. I wonder...

I did get a sermon written, thanks for your help and suggestions folks! And thanks to Quilly for being very helpful with her 'build a Quilly sermon v.1.0' feature that may find itself in use sometime soon! So, I preached on the Bible, though not 'from' the Bible, normally I am careful to link what I say with the Lections for the Day, but this time I let them speak for themselves and did a little bit about how we approach scripture. I think many of us have a very limited approach to scripture and just see it all as one big lump of inspired 'stuff' without thinking or learning about what actually makes up our Bibles. But rather than launch into sermon mark II I will do my usual of giving you the opening bit and then letting you follow that up at New Kid Deep Stuff by clicking on the [more] at the end. As for how I ended up with this sermon, I actually used the basis of an old sermon and extensively rewrote and added to it! For those who are used to the 40 mi...

It's Bible Sunday tomorrow and I thought I should preach on the Bible... Pretty simple, you might think, but thirty years of being in the Church (yes I was eight when I started) and twenty years of more formal study make it a huge subject and I am having real problems narrowing it down. What makes it more difficult is that the theme given by the Bible Society is 'a feast of God's word' which is essentially what I have been saying over the past few weeks as we have been studying the Bible at our teaching evenings. I know that most of the people who will be coming to my main service tomorrow haven't been at our evening sessions, but some have, and i wonder whether I am selling them short, as it were, by re-using material I've used before. Some Clergy reuse sermons all the time, we have a three year cycle of readings, so three years down the road it is possible to pretty much preach the same thing - I know of one minister in a University who did exactly that, bec...

This morning saw me going into the local school, where I am a governor and my daughter is a pupil, to help out one of the teachers with a lesson on 'The Bible' as part of their Religious Studies series on 'sacred texts'. The kids were 9 years old or so (Year 4/5) and I was there just to give a general overview as to why the Bible is so important, a bit about what is in it, and a bit of where it came from. What struck me as i spoke to these interested, enthusiastic, thoughtful children was how complicated it is to try and explain things in simple terms when one has been 'theologically educated'. I knew that it would be a waste of time, and totally irrelevant, if I started talking about 'sources' or 'form criticism' or 'redaction' - things which so easily trip off my tongue when I talk to other Christians about Scriptural matters. In the end these things didn't matter, they wanted to know why I believe that the Bible is 'God'...