Category Archives: Reflections

Prepare the way for the Lord

Advent is a good time to remember that the Bible we read is not a peaceful read.  It is a text borne of trauma, displacement, and loss.  The ancient writers who penned sacred scripture — and the vast majority of characters who populate its pages — were not, by and large, history’s winners.  They were the persecuted.  The dislocated.  The enslaved. The desperate.  They lived through periods of famine, war, plague, and natural disaster. They suffered starvation, violence, barrenness, captivity, exile, colonization, and genocide. They were, in countless ways, the wretched of the earth.  Brave, lonely voices, crying in the desert. 

Jesus’s last sermon

What would you do if you knew that Jesus was returning at midnight tonight? How would you spend the next fifteen hours? Praying, asking for forgiveness for all the things you’ve put off doing?
What if you knew he would return a week from today? How would you prioritise doing all those things you haven’t got around to doing? What matters most? [More to come … click on Title]

God whom we serve is able …

The Mark reading features two unconnected – or not obviously connected – incidents/teachings.  Actually, the whole chapter seems to be an assembly of some of the things Jesus did and taught in the week just before his execution.
Although, given that I’m touched first of all by the pompous ways of the scribes, especially in contrast to the meekness and humility of the widow, Mark may well have placed these two segments beside each other intentionally. 
…
But I feel rather to pick up on something from the Psalm reading … [more follows: click on title]