Virtual Methodist

On Sunday like many others, I was wrestling with the perplexing story of the "Canaanite woman" in Matthew 15: 21-28. How quickly we turn a blind eye to the shocking words of Jesus to this woman in distress, although as I said on Sunday, both Matthew and Mark include this story after a dialogue between Jesus and disciples about what and who is unclean and why, and the Pharisee's rejection of him because of such teaching, and using the longer reading from the Matthew suggested by the lectionary helps our understanding (though few use it). I did also use Jesus' questioning of Simon Peter's understanding to refer to another story in Acts that took place near this episode, much later, when the "slow-of-learning" Simon Peter's eyes were opened to the breadth of Jesus' ministry and God's grace... I will come back to that tomorrow. As part of the sermon I said I couldn't imagine what was going through the mind of this nameless woman, desperate fo...

My previous post focussed on a monologue based, in part, around the Gospel reading in last Sunday's lectionary, which I used in the Radio Ulster Service at 10.15am that morning. 45 minutes later I was back in the Agape Centre where we had previously recorded that service, preaching on the same passages for our Livestreamed Circuit service. I didn't subject them to exactly the same sermon and instead of reading the Old Testament passage I offered a rehearsed reading of the following longer monologue which was based on that story and what immediately preceded it. Below the monologue you can see the service, with my "performance" of the piece at around 4 minutes 15 seconds in. It should have been my moment of triumph… God’s moment of triumph… But it quickly turned into the worst days of my life… I couldn’t understand it… why God would let it happen. After years of warning Ahab and his pagan wife Jezebel that it would not rain unless they honoured the Lord God of Israel...

Earlier today, as well as speaking at our circuit livestreamed service, I also led the Service on Radio Ulster, which you should be able to listen to on BBC Sounds for the next 27 days. As part of it, my friend Trevor Gill from Bright Umbrella Drama Company performed an adapted excerpt from a one man play I wrote last year during my time of sabbatical at Holden Village in Washington State. The play is entitled “On Joppa Shore” and in it we find Simon Peter is sitting on the Joppa seafront where the prophet Jonah supposedly left on his fateful journey, reflecting not only on Jonah’s life and ministry, but also on his experience following Jesus up to that point, and what was likely to happen in the future at a key turning point in his own life… this excerpt covers the story in today's lectionary reading from Matthew 14: 22-33. At some point in the future I hope to have the full play available for performance... Storms come at us for all sorts of reasons, and seemingly no reason at a...

Neural Synapse. An Electron Microscope Photograph  by Thomas Deerinck I got derailed from my series on parables... I may return to it at a mythical point in the future when I have time, but over the past couple of weeks I've been reading a few books and articles that touch on the physical/neurological nature of thought, perception and existence (as well as watching the gloriously dated 1960's film version of "The Fantastic Voyage"). All that "sparked" this poem/prayer... "God of the Gaps" is the disparaging term used both by atheists who see the idea of a deity as a simplistic explanation for physical phenomena that science has not yet explained, and by some conservative Christians who use it to describe the God they don't believe in, suggesting that the revelation of God as they interpret it in scripture, trumps all scientific "theories." As a Christian with a scientific bent and a love of words I thought it was time to "redeem...

This is a slight departure from my proposed series in Holden Village, but this morning my friend Father Martin Magill asked me to contribute to the "First Thoughts" series he has developed for the Parish of St. John the Evangelist over on the Falls Road, offering daily reflections on the Gospel reading from the Catholic Daily Lectionary. This morning it just happened to be Matthew 13: 18-23, Jesus' "explanation" of the Parable of the Sower, so it seemed appropriate to include it here. Normally when I do a "Thought for the Day" or even my Sunday sermon I prepare a relatively tight script to avoid me disappearing off on tangents... But this morning, as per my brief from Martin I performed without the benefit of such a safety net... so these are my unexpurgated first thoughts.   Selah

"The Red Vineyards near Arles" Vincent Van Gogh (1988) Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow Returning to stories firmly set in the agrarian setting of 1st century Palestine, the theory was that today at Holden Village I would be looking at the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard later in Matthew's Gospel, under the title of "First Century Socialism?" with the "s-word" always an interesting one in the context of the USA. For a change the dramatic introduction I planned to use would not be a new piece but one I wrote for my friend Micky Youngson's installation as President of the Methodist Church in Great Britain that year (hence MCGB News), and if I can crank my old computer into gear I may post the video we recorded for the event. ps. I'm back to using Van Gogh images to illustrate, having failed to find an appropriate one for yesterday's Parable of the Leaven. This one "The Red Vineyards near Arles", was painted in autumn 1888 ...

Another parable of growth, this time set in a more domestic environment. The lecture I had planned to do  today in Holden Village was entitled "In Praise of Corruption", given that a number of commentators point out that leaven (a fermenting "sourdough starter" rather than the little packets of commercial bakers' yeast that were in such short supply at the beginning of lockdown) was usually a metaphor for corruption in the Old Testament and rabbinic texts. Others point out the scandalous nature of using a "woman's task" as a metaphor for the Kingdom of Heaven in a highly patriarchal society.  However, Amy Jill Levine, the Jewish New Testament scholar casts significant doubt on both those readings of the text, perhaps leaving us with a relatively simple tale of someone getting their quantities completely wrong, leading me to imagine to this short scene: He told them still another parable:  “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and m...