You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2012.
Spending the day with Professor Pamela Klassen and fifty Diocese of BC Clergy at a “Clergy Day”.
It is that time of year again. Many organizations are preparing for annual meetings. The past year’s performance is being reviewed, numbers crunched, budgets prepared, visions for the future proposed.
Every once in a while as a preacher, I receive a response to my sermon that stands out as particularly gratifying.
The story of Jesus healing an valid in John 5:1-18 is not a pleasant story.
I have been thinking about hurt – not the hurt in my knee that is my faithful companion these days, but the more vague, unfocused, psychic emotional pain that grinds somewhere between my head and my gut. This is the hurt I can carry for years. It is the hurt that can poison every hour of my day. It almost always relates to people.
Recently, in reference to Jesus’ words in John 4:34-38, I wrote that the task of the Christian life is not so much to exert our will to bring it into conformity with God’s will as it is to find where the Spirit of God is at work and enter into that work in cooperation with the flow of God’s Spirit. This is easy to say, harder to do.
To a casual reading, John 4:43-45 may seem to be little more than a couple of throwaway lines, a transitional paragraph intended only to move the narrative along.
But there are important details in John 4:43-45 that can contribute to our understanding of the whole chapter.
People who connect themselves in some way to the Christian church represent a baffling diversity of opinion about many issues. You do not have to go far in the church to find a robust debate about almost any important matter relating to life, spirituality, and the institution of the church. It is sometimes difficult to imagine how such a variety of opinion can ever coexist in one communal expression.
Throughout John 4:1-42 Jesus speaks of a kind of water that leaves those who drink it never again feeling thirsty. He holds out the possibility of food which when eaten leaves us never again experiencing hunger.
Sixth Sitting Synod of the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia Sunday 15 January 2012
Sunday afternoon, we got down to the challenging business of dealing with Notices of Motion.
