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…

In the mid 1990s, Arthur W. Frank published a landmark and fascinating study on people’s response to illness, entitled, The Wounded Storyteller. As a professor of sociology at the University of Calgary, Frank considered the various ways we respond to our illness, particularly the illnesses that are chronic in their character. He identified a number of responses that we make to our experience of such illness ranging from denial through to resignation – none of which were especially helpful in learning how to live in the fullest way in the face of our illness.  What he suggested as the most redemptive or transformative pathway was what he termed as being…

In the film Black Robe, the main character is a young missionary part of the European expansion into Canada.  He is named as Paul Laforgue, and he saw his mission as one to convert the Canadian Indians to Christianity.  He was a sensitive and cultured man and at first seemed unable to appreciate the people to whom he had come to minister, people who lived in a Huron village 1500 miles from Quebec. At some stage on a journey away from the village in which he was based, however, another tribe, the Iroquois, captured him.  Eventually, he escaped.  Full of doubt and despair, broken and overwhelmed with the sense of…

Today throughout the world, marches for peace are held.  Palm Sunday has become a day on which rallies for peace are staged in many of the cities of the world.  It leads us to ask what is it about this day that speaks of peace, of the hope for peace?  Though many who march for peace today may not be Christian, and even though a number of people take part in the walks for a mixture of political motivation, nonetheless it would seem that the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem has something in it that speaks of the possibility of peace.  How is this so? Perhaps we see the answer in the stress…

There is a story about an American philosopher who went to Japan for a conference on religion.  He overheard another American delegate speaking to a Shinto priest.  “We’ve now been to a good many of your ceremonies,” said the delegate, ‘and have seen quite a few of your shrines.  But I don’t get your ideology; I don’t get your theology.”  The Japanese paused as though in deep thought and then slowly shook his head.  “We don’t have an ideology”, he said.  ‘We don’t have a theology.  We dance!” Perhaps we have forgotten that Christianity, itself, began as a dance.  There was no ideology, no comprehensive philosophy.  Rather there was a series of extraordinary gestures in the life of Jesus…

We enter the Season of Lent, that time given us each year to renew our baptismal lives.  In the waters of baptism we died to a purely natural life and we rose to a new life of promise and expectation.  Now in the weeks that are to follow. as we prepare to celebrate Easter. we remember that extraordinary mystery into which we were immersed, and we admit that we are only half-living, and only fitfully loving.  Yes, we recognise that the remarkable conversion detailed in our baptism is far from achieved, and we commit ourselves again to a new moment, We are called always into conversion.  Again we are invited to see life in…

It was Teresa of Avila, writing in the 16th century, who remarked that we should all learn how to read the texts of the gospels in their original language. Well, I doubt that many of us will be able to fulfil her challenge, including me.  However, one of the things we begin to recognise about Scripture is that often enough the translation we are used to sometimes fails to convey the meaning of the original Greek, the language in which the gospels were written.  The use of the phrase, “feeling sorry” in this account of Jesus’ encounter with a leper is a case in point. The original Greek illustrates that Jesus did not…