The Dark Side...?
An article for 3-in-1
I’m writing this in the week following the Floyd in the Flesh concert.
I was asked to design the logo for our concerts and events and then create a special page on our website. I wanted the logo to reflect the breadth of events we offer – from Rock through Folk to Woollen Woods. It made me think about the appropriateness of what we were doing. Then a friend wanted me to help him buy tickets (he had never been in a church building before); so, I took him and introduced him to the place. He commented that it was odd that we would do this in ‘a church’. I responded with words similar to those I had put at the top of the web page:
‘Our church buildings are treasured spaces in which the living Church frequently gathers but which are also offered to the wider community. We are delighted to offer these concerts and events.’
Love, Loss, Life
“Grief”, paraphrased our late Queen Elizabeth II, “is the price we pay for love”. To remember is to continue the healing power of grief: a human experience as powerful as love. The one is not the opposite or absence of the other: grief is a continuation of love, one heart still aching for another.
Jesus grieved when he heard of the death of his friend Lazarus. But for Jesus death was not the end. Jesus, we are told, went to the tomb and said “Lazarus, come out”.
In St. John’s Gospel Jesus’ authority is demonstrated by ‘signs’. The first at a wedding, this last after a funeral: both events being signifiers of love. Lazarus was raised from the dead as a sign of the new order of things. To emphasise this Jesus said ‘I am the resurrection and the life, whoever comes to me shall never die but have God’s life’. Death is defeated by Jesus. Jesus Christ himself becomes the ‘thin place’ straddling earth and heaven, time and eternity.
We humans mourn and grieve, it is our God-given grace. We love extravagantly and mourn passionately the loss of one we love. But Jesus’ sign assures us that our grief, which he shared in the story of Lazarus, is not the end: ‘Love never dies’ St. Paul reminds us.
Jesus willingly gave up his life so that we might have a new kind of life, one energised and inhabited by God — the Source of eternal life and love.
First published in the Derby Telegraph Faith files 29/10/2022
Trinity
Trinity, that scary noun that conjures up the ineffable, sublime, irreducible nature of God.
Tri-unity is not a word found in the Bible, it was created some 150 years after Paul wrote his letter to the Romans.
Paul indeed may well be bemused at the 2000 years of work seeking to describe the Trinity: because for Paul the Trinity wasn’t a theological construct: the Trinity was a lived experience. And it’s that lived experience that Paul describes in this passage from Romans, chapter five. Read More…
Jesse Tree
Journeys
Some see life is a journey from life to death, Christians often express life as a pilgrimage, not just a journey from a beginning to an end but as a means of making more-or-less sense of more-or-less faith; of seeking understanding, of journeying towards a sanctuary.From a beginning to a beginning. Holding an awareness of something other than us, something that transcends what we observe around us.
Life as a pilgrimage, faith seeking understanding, action that pushes forward where the feet often falter.
October 2020
April 2020
March 2020
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
April 2019
March 2019
February 2019
January 2019