Virtual Methodist

A new poem for this year based on the Gospel reading from today's Daily lectionary Luke 7: 18-30. Are you the one Who is to come; The one my mother said I recognised while we were both still in the womb? Are you the one who is to come, or have I led everyone  along the wrong road through the wilderness? Are you the one who is to come, or should we look out for someone else, or is no-one coming at all? Are you the one who is to come; the all-atoning lamb of God, or have I sacrificed myself for nothing? Are you the one who is to come; the one to heal, not only the blind, deaf, infirm and ill, but all of creation? Are you the one who is to come? If so, then come quickly For I can’t last much longer In this dark place. Selah

I rarely post "sermons" here... but last Sunday a couple of those who were present at the Grosvenor Hall suggested that I might do so... so here it is, in its un-edited glory... Please forgive the inevitable typos... OLD TESTAMENT READING: Jeremiah 33:14-16 GOSPEL READING:  Luke 21: 25-36 On Thursday morning, with a hard frost on the ground I came down to breakfast to have Sally tell me that having let the cat out, and swiftly back in again after her morning necessities, a little robin that regularly follows her round the garden when she is working, flew across the patio and perched on the back of one of our chairs sitting there, looking through the doorway, waiting for her to come out with the mealworms that she regularly puts out for it… And it reminded me of the famous poem “Hope” by Emily Dickinson,           Hope is the thing with feathers           That perches in the soul,           A...

About six weeks ago, reflecting on the 30 th anniversary of the IRA ceasefire I wrote a poem that embodied my feelings at the time and over the following three decades, and I subsequently read it at a service in Clonard Monastery organised to mark both the IRA and later Loyalist ceasefires… On this day which marks the 30 th anniversary of the statement by the Combined Loyalist Military Command, my reflections are somewhat longer and more prosaic. At the time Gusty Spence read the ceasefire statement my first emotion was a reinforcement of the profound sense of relief that had hit me 6 weeks earlier. The fact of the ceasefire didn’t surprise me as much as the previous one. Various sources, publicly and privately had assured me that it was coming. But the wording was interesting. The suggestion that the “permanence” of the Loyalist ceasefire   was “completely dependant upon the continued cessation of all nationalist/republican violence” maintained the myth that loyalist viol...

Written today on a wonderfully relaxing holiday in Istria, and dedicated to our marvellous hosts and tour guides Nikki and Steve. Bobbing on the surface Of a sun-warmed sea, Just off a shingly shore, Buoyed by the salt water, Feeling muscles, taut For far too long, relax, I realise that I rarely permit My mind to do the same; That even now I am grasping For words to encapsulate This all too rare experience, Rather than mentally drifting Off from the shingly shore To lie back, bobbing. Selah

Sally and I are gearing up to go on holiday with friends next week, in an effort to find some sun before we develop rickets. But as I was thinking about it during the week my memory drifted back to one of the first "sunshine" holidays we had together, 30 years ago, in Crete. I was just out of theological college and had got my first 6 weeks in our first appointment under my belt and we were exhausted (and broke). Sally was also expecting our first child, and an older couple from Newcastle on Tyne in the room next to us took pity on us and took us under their wing somewhat. On the last evening, the 29th August, we ended up at the same restaurant and decided to share a table. It turned out, somewhat unusually for those days, that their son was doing a PhD in Belfast, and conversation got round to their anxieties about this and the troubles in Northern Ireland. "Will there ever be peace?" the husband asked. "I'm not sure I'll see it in my day," I said...

A family memory. Every Saturday until I left home, apart from a few weeks each summer when soup vegetables were unobtainable in the greengrocers, my mum made a vast vat of soup which fed all-comers, with enough leftover for Sunday lunch when it was even better. It was usually followed by freshly baked scones, which were also lovely, but unlike the soup were not so lovely the next day. Indeed by some strange process they transformed into small indigestible organic rocks.  However, on one Saturday when I was very young, excitement over my older brother's newly purchased motorbike resulted in me getting a bowl of my mum's soup pour down my neck and chest  necessitating a swift trip to the A&E in the arms of my dad, one of only two times I can remember him holding me. But s o many of my teenage Saturday lunchtimes were made up of coming home from rugby to steep in a hot bath, emerging to an equally hot bowl of soup and a house full of family. Beef bone steeped from Friday...