Virtual Methodist

Are you listening? The theme for this year's 4 Corners Festival , which began last Thursday evening and runs to next Sunday evening in St. Nicholas' Parish Church, is "The Art of Listening". Yesterday at Fitzroy Presbyterian, the church where 4 Corners founder, Steve Stockman , is the current minister, my friend and colleague, Heather Morris, preached a challenging sermon on that theme, and it is worth a listen (or a read) . But we began the festival with an event organised by EmbraceNI , in the City Hall; "From Syria (and elsewhere) with Grace , looking at the plight of refugees and asylum seekers coming to this city and what we as churches might do to help. It was important to be warned of the danger of our compassion for Syrian refugees here and elsewhere adversely affecting refugees and asylum seekers from elsewhere... to hear about the gap between the granting of asylum and the ability to access benefits or be permitted to take a job... and heart-breaking to...

Was going to leave things fallow for a couple of days, but then I was pointed towards this story in the Daily Mail , peddling their usual brand of xenophobia, with tales of waves of Romanians ready to come and claim benefits in the UK... The journalists (and I use that word liberally) on that paper, which prides itself in standing up for the UK as a Christian country seem to have missed out huge chunks of the Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke... about there being no room in the inn, and Jesus' parents being asylum seekers...  But they're not too keen on lots of the Old Testament either... the bits that talk about looking after the poor and the alien... Anyway, it reminded me of this poem that I adapted a couple of years ago: No Room: We're Full There's no room in this country, we're full up In fact we're overcrowded, there's hardly room for us (well, for our cars, at any rate) so we really can't take you or anyone else Sorry...

A couple of weeks ago various news providers picked up on a supposed scientific model for the parting of the Red Sea in the Biblical Book of Exodus. According to a team from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the waters could have been divided by an east wind of 63 mph blowing for 12 hours… not on the Red Sea proper, but the shallow, but still treacherous Sea of Reeds some miles to the north… Apparently such winds could have created a land bridge about two miles long and three miles wide for four hours. They don’t, however, explain how the Israelites could possibly have crossed this land bridge in the teeth of such a gale. Given meteorologists inability to predict the weather tomorrow with any accuracy I’m not pinning my belief structure on the scientific truth of this fanciful computer model. Actually, I’m not interested trying to find modern scientific models to explain these and other events described in scripture, but to see what light such stories s...

Channel 4 aired Penny Woolcock's film "Exodus" on Monday night past (19th November 2007). It was a, that dreaded word, "reworking" of the second book of the Old Testament, and like many Channel 4 Films, and films with a religious/Biblical dimension, it was both interesting and frustrating at the same time. The director, Penny Woolcock , has a history of making films in avant garde ways, and are usually imbued with a strong sense of social conscience, from her first film When the Dog Bites to Shakespeare on the Estate and the drama trilogy Tina Goes Shopping, Tina Takes a Break and the controversial 2006 release, Mischief Night. She often uses "real" people rather than actors (as a former actor I am not sure about that contrast!), and that was very much the case here, with a number of the set pieces being filmed at a special Exodus Day Festival in Margate, a somewhat run-down seaside resort on the Isle of Thanet in Kent. The broad gist of the plot is th...