3 SEPTEMBER 2010

 COMMENT FROM THE EDITOR

Time flies and thus only a snippet, a letter-ette today.

Enjoy the joke, enjoy the thought, enjoy the weekend, and enjoy the service.

 PRELIMINARY REMINDER

Worship returns to 9.30am and 11.00am this Sunday.

PRELIMINARY ONE-LINER

After last week’s favourite festival joke (‘I went on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday.  Never again.’) your editor thought a start with another one liner might be appropriate. 

Never respond to an anonymous letter.

 or perhaps even the winner from last year’s festival.

 “Hedgehogs – why can’t they just share the hedge?”

 THOUGHT

 Here’s something from Karl Barth, one of the theologians of the 20^th century.  It seemed appropriate as schools are now well underway and with… click here to read more

Short, fictitious narrative by which moral or spiritual relations are set forth.

Thus the Encyclodedia Brittanica tells us about a parabola and a parable.

This week we begin a year-long focus on the parables of Jesus and we begin with the parable of the Sower as described in the Gospel of Mark (chapter 4).  Perhaps Mark knew something we don’t know: did he intentionally provide to us a story, a narrative, an illustration in which parable and parabola are so beautifully intertwined?

We see the woman or man out in the field with the collection of seed for sowing.  In gentle,… click here to read more

13 AUGUST 2010 

COMMENTS FROM THE EDITOR

There is the sense of busy preparation in the background as we begin to sidle towards the start of a new session.  Plans are being made, ideas are being tossed about and your editor….reaches for another cup of coffee.

Inspiration in a cafetiere. 

THOUGHT

 The Edinburgh Book Festival is nigh and your editor often peruses the programme with unconcealed delight at all the possibilities.  Lots of great ideas, stories, conversations, books and treasures.  Amongst the guests this year is the Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, whose work is so often a vivid, physical recreation of memory or a pointer beyond the horizon.  Here’s a favourite:

The annals say: when… click here to read more

Pius Mau Pialiug, a master-navigator, died on 12 July, aged 78.

Few, if any of us, will have heard his name.  He was a Micronesian and in 1976 he sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti, 2500 miles in open sea.  Without a compass, without any mechanical assistance for navigation.  From the earliest age he was introduced by his grandfather into the means of navigating with all that nature had given us.  His grandfather held his tiny body in tidal pools so he could learn how waves and wind blew differently from place to place.  He soon learned other lessons.  He could read how far he was from shore and its direction by the feel of the swell against… click here to read more

COMMENTS FROM THE EDITOR

A bit later than usual today.
Your editor had to take his BBQ for a walk down the prom.  Don’t ask..

 DON’T FORGET:
9.30AM       Communion      
10.30AM    Service

 THOUGHT 

Don Cupitt is a theologian known for his radical views and his attempts to reconcile the modern world view and Christianity.  In a book written in 2008, The Meaning of the West: An Apologia for Secular Christianity, he writes the following:

 For many years I laboured to reconcile Church-Christianity and the modern world.  I now see that the critics were right, and it cannot be done.  Church-Christianity is gradually becoming more and more counter-cultural (a euphemism for ‘irrational’)… click here to read more

A question posed by a member of the congregation.  Tempting as it is to respond with a Gallic shrug and say, ‘Ask God’, a response (not an answer!  too presumptuous!) is required.

Let’s look at the texts for the day.  A description of the Fall in Genesis 3.  Adam and Eve want to be like God: knowing good and evil, eternal life.  They take the fruit and eat.  Then, banishment from Eden and so much that follows stems from that fateful decision.  Original sin often is mentioned and sin is often seen as the focus on the self, cutting oneself off from God.  The middle letter in ‘sin’ is ‘I’.  Me first.

Genesis… click here to read more

Thus asked a member of the congregation and I wasn’t quite sure how to take it.  Was it serious?  Was it a bit flippant or tongue-in-cheek?

Let’s assume in the first instance that the person was serious.  In Christian theology God is unmade.  God simply is.  God existed before anything was and will be there when all things draw to a close.  Something like Aristotle’s unmoved mover. 

The question may have been an expression of perplexity.  We cannot conceive of anything like this.  We cannot imagine something, a being, an essence, God which exists for all time and all eternity.  Something that jut is.  It goes beyond one of my favourite illustrations.  The Hubble telescope has sent… click here to read more

4 JUNE 2010 

COMMENTS FROM THE EDITOR

Your weekly (well, most weeks) newsletter (well, more than news and far less than gossip) zooming (at least arriving) into your intray (metaphorically, of course) for information and fun and enjoyment (or at least one out of three). 

THOUGHT

Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher whose thinking on the conception of the self in the modern world and on secularity is both insightful and challenging.  He is a practising Catholic who is at home in the post-modern world, searching for ways of thinking through the depths of our faith and cultural heritages.  Here he has been talking about links across boundaries based ‘not on kinship but on the kind of… click here to read more