Today has been designated as National Coming Out Day.
There’s been so much going on recently in the media and social media about gay bishops in the Church of England.
This seems to me to say it in a more elegant way than all the letters to the press, editorials, blog posts and twitter posts by the score.
I think that I’m with you Father K, there is a time and place for everything and a service where the problems of a problematic passage can’t be addressed easily is not the place to read it, lectionary be hanged.
My favourite bits of the Bible are the Song of Songs (which, in the medieval period, was interpreted by both Jews and Christians as an allegory of the soul’s relationship with God); the book of Ruth; the book of Esther; the story of David and Jonathan; Amos & Micah. Most of the New Testament leaves me completely cold, and some of it is actually offensive, especially the account of the silver-smiths of Ephesus, and the way that Paul appropriates pagan poetry in the marketplace of Athens.
I think the solution to your problem is not to read the “difficult” bits without some sort of homily about a better way to understand them, and how to read the Bible in general as a collection of texts situated in a particular historical situation.
We had some theological students in church yesterday who had come as a group to observe our goings on. This is something that I got involved in last year too. They go around several churches and then invite the preacher into their class which takes place later in the week to discuss what happened. I…
I managed to resist the temptation to preach on the text, “Lazarus, Come Out!” this morning. Instead, here is what I did say: I want to begin this morning, not with a story, but with a stained glass window. It isn’t a window in this building. No, it is in the place where I first…
I spent part of this afternoon at the 25th anniversary of Glasgow SPRED. Know what that is? I certainly didn’t, but I do now. It is an initiative in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese and it was lovely to spend the afternoon in the company of the RC Church at its best. To be precise, the…
One of the things that I have to be aware of at St Mary’s is that there are always quite a lot of people there who have not come from an Episcopal background. That means that when it comes to festivals, there are folk who don’t know what to expect. (Former Roman Catholics are exceptions.…
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