Month: January 2022

The Psalm in Sunday’s lectionary includes these words;- “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.” Words can be very powerful, for good or ill: this is an important prayer.

Sunday’s lectionary includes a passage from Nehemiah. The law of Moses is being read to the people – it is a kind of return to their roots. I wonder what our roots are. What are the things that give us identity? … “That is who I am – that is where I come from”? The people needed to be able to hear with understanding (v2). Mere slogans won’t do.

Good to walk through the clearance this morning. It was wet and gloomy with low cloud. About quarter to nine a bit of pannus just above the dam wall started to break up and blow away. In a couple of minutes the rain was less, it was looking brighter and the edge of the valley was visible for the first time. The cloud was just about hanging on in the trees. A few more minutes, no rain and bits of blue sky, which before long was entirely blue. Happy walking.

So it’s kind of appropriate that Sunday’s lectionary Psalm is 19, “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” I believe that Psalm is appropriate in every weather too. I don’t like the rain as much or fog, or wind or ice as much as I used to, but they too are about the glory of God.

And that goes for the landscape as well. There’s no bit of the world I look at that’s unaffected by the human race – quarries, managed moorlands, green fields, reservoirs, roads, paths – but God has given us the inventiveness and abilities to work with our planet. We mess it up at our peril.

A good morning for walking today…

Also, in Sunday’s Lectionary, 1 Corinthians, an early form of the ‘my dog has no nose’ joke. Bur seriously – a vital lesson for people like me who often wish they had the abilities of someone else, forgetting that they have plenty of abilities of their own. …an antidote (I hope) to talent envy (an earlier post).

According to next Sunday’s lectionary, Jesus goes into the synagogue of his home village Nazareth, and reads this from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” And then, says Luke, “And [Jesus] rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”“

To hear the people’s reaction, we’ll have to wait for Sunday 30th. Meanwhile, though, what words! Just imagine that being said, maybe not an a village, but in the city of Manchester (above). In this view from the hills, it is a distant, hazy place. But it is a place of life and death, pain and joy, multiplied by thousands, a place of big events, a place that has been on the news today. “The year of the Lord’s favour” is something to be hungry for.

Please pray for the city.
Please pray for every city.

Walk to Wild Bank in the mist this morning before church, just for lols. An easy way to get high.

Tomorrow’s lectionary includes a Psalm about the ‘steadfast love’ of God. It’s not always clear from experience that God’s love is steadfast, though I believe it is. I still think ‘steadfast’ is a good thing for love to be.

Disturbed to read this on the BBC website. Presumably MI5 deals with this kind of stuff all the time. Why has this received such prominence now, at a time when the government is mired in scandal? Draw your own conclusions. Also, if Ms Lee is not a spy, what is she – a lobbyist? Plenty of people lobby MP’s, and plenty make donations of doubtful provenance. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence so far that any MP’s have acted improperly in this case.

In Sunday’s Lectionary, where we read about Jesus at the wedding feast in Cana, there’s a couple of time-related bits that remind us of the writer’s interest in the symbolic importance of what Jesus does … “On the third day”, and when Jesus says his hour hasn’t yet come. So watch out for things that are to do with the bigger scope of Jesus’ life and death, resurrection and meaning.

And here’s another thing;- when the time is right for Jesus to act, he just does it. He doesn’t ask the steward’s permission. According to the gospels, this is also how he was with the religious authorities too. He didn’t need their permission to do what was right, he just did it. I’m not sure how far we can go in suggesting it as a model for our behaviour, because we can be deluded when we think something’s right – but it’s something to think about.

Churches, every organisation, need a loose goose or two. Such people need to be valued. They can think thoughts and say things that groupthink will not allow. You could argue that Jesus was a loose goose.