I’m sure many of us have at some time enjoyed the English television comedy, “The Vicar of Dibley.”  You may recall at the end of each episode, the vicar tells Alice, the church warden, a joke.  The joke is often quite funny but Alice never quite gets it.  She applies a literal logic to the joke, and she tries to reason the joke out, all of course to the frustration of the vicar.  I often think that before many of the stories of the gospel and before the parables of Jesus we are a bit like Alice in the “Vicar of Dibley.”  We apply to what we have heard a logic that is quite foreign…

How often we can fail to recognise the presence of God in the ordinary things of life.  We want God to come in the grand scheme, in a form that takes away all our doubt and anxiety, in the miraculous gesture. This is at the base of the apocalyptic cults such as QAnon amongst others.  And in so doing, we miss the presence of God in the smile of a stranger, the challenging word of a friend, the simplicity of the scene outside our window. This is at the heart of the gospel this Sunday. Who could think that this peasant from Nazareth was the prophet long expected? The people in today’s gospel…

As you may know, the story of the IT giant, Apple, is of a tech fairytale of one garage, three friends and very humble beginnings. As is now the stuff of legend, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak teamed up together in their 20s. Wozniak had designed a new form of computer to resemble a typewriter; Jobs sold his VW bus to fund the production, and Apple began on 1 April 1976, named after the apple farms in Oregon where Jobs had been laboring.  And the rest is history, as they say.  However, things may well have been consigned to history if it weren’t for another player in the story, John Scully.  In…

The well-known late 20th century spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, recounts a celebration of the Easter Vigil in the L’Arche community in which he was living for a time and with which he was closely associated just prior to his death. The L’Arche communities are those founded by the French Canadian Catholic, Jean Vanier for peoples with disabilities, and I cannot think of a more powerful commentary on the meaning of the encounter with the Risen Christ proclaimed this Sunday.  It is an encounter with the Risen One who remains forever the Wounded One, an encounter with something so tangible and so earthly and yet with something so sublime and so…