Curate Conundrums

The Holy Spirit can be quite hard to describe, and it’s something that I often find myself thinking about. What exactly is the Holy Spirit and what does it mean for us to have it? The Holy Spirit has been described as being a little bit like the force from Star Wars, an energy which binds the universe together, that flows in and through all things. Whether this is a good description or not I’m not sure, in fact I could be committing an act of great heresy, I’ll leave that up to you and Ian to decide. The one thing we do know about the Holy Spirit is that it turns up, in all sorts of unexpected places. It is the creative and spontaneous energy of the trinity, and is one of the forms in which we recognise God’s revelation to us. That is a way in which God reveals God’s self to us.   The Holy Spirit isn’t, for a start, part of God, it is God and it is indivisible from the Father and the Son. We know that the spirit isn’t into partiality, and we know what the fruits of the sp...

Have you ever had that niggling feeling in the back of your mind? The sort of feeling that just won’t go away, the compulsion to do something, or to say something. Something dragging you towards something else, like the way in a cartoon, a finger beckons out of the mist from a pie, and the character has no choice but to follow it? Sometimes the Holy Spirit leads us to unexpected places. In our curate’s training group we did an exercise in which we had to discern what our learning style was, which also feeds into personality too. There were four quadrants in this particular model. Activist, how much of a doer are you? Do you like to get stuck in? A Reflector, people who like to gather data by reading and listening, they have a thoroughly methodical approach.   A Theorist, people who are rational and analytical, they point out flaws in thinking and ask probing questions. A Pragmatist, people who like to solve problems and experiment with new ideas. They are mostly interested ...

As somebody who has a natural distrust of government, and people in positions of power, today’s reading from 1 Peter is one, when taken at face value I substantially struggle with. On the face of it disagree with. With the local elections coming up, it’s good for us as Christians to reflect on things such as power and authority, who has it? Who do we give it to? Where do we get it from? Now I’m not suggesting that we should take up arms against the government and form barricades around City Hall, like a Norwich version of Les Mis. ‘Do you hear the people sing, ‘cause they haven’t emptied the bin.’ But I think when we look at this letter within its context then it makes much more sense and is much more agreeable to those of us with a slightly less obedient mentality, when it comes to earthly government. What I don't think this letter is saying, is that we have to blindly obey those in authority. We’re not sure exactly who wrote this letter. Lots of scholars are unsure abou...

‘Acts of the Apostles’ is a bit of an unfair name for the book our sermon series is on at the moment. Most of the apostles only get a passing mention, and most of the book focuses on the story of Paul, but I suppose ‘Acts of some of the apostles and quite a lot of what Paul did after he was converted’ is not a very catchy title. Poor old Philip barely gets a mention. But still It’s a great book, that weaves together a narrative about what happened after Jesus, and how the early church started. It’s a funny sort of book, not funny in a ha ha sort of way, but funny in terms of what it is, what is it? Well a mixture of things, It’s often referred to as a History, but it’s not written like a dry Greek history book of the time would’ve been, so kind of, it is. Some scholars think that it’s a biblical history book, because Luke, the writer, who you might remember from such hits as ‘the gospel of Luke’, must have had excellent knowledge of the Greek Septuagint (that’s the Greek Old Testa...

Who do you listen to? Who has authority? It’s a funny old world that we live in at the moment isn’t it? Russia flexing its muscles in Europe, Brexit and austerity, fake news, real news. It’s difficult to know who we should be listening to, or indeed who even has authority. The passage from John this morning indicates that Jesus was having precisely these issues with people, people who didn’t believe in him in the right way. It also indicates where he gest his authority from, from God. He’s hitting them here with a few home truths, and they don’t like it, not one bit. Just before the passage we heard this morning, Jesus said to the people who were present, Jews who had believed in him, that they were slaves to sin, by trying to kill him, and that only he can set them free. They are foaming at the mouth angry “We’ve never been slaves!” they answer, “we’re Abraham’s descendents!” This was a common boast of Jewish people at the time. Jesus then goes on to say that they are essentia...

As the old Christmas Carol goes ‘Christian children all must be, mild obedient, good as he.’ I was of course always an obedient child, I never spoke back to my parents and always did their will without question. Obvs. Well, of course I didn’t. We’re all human and sometimes we have to go our own way. Sometimes life also calls for obedience. Here’s another family story, in case you missed the one from last week. Mum still brings this one up about once a year. We had a green race car teapot when I was growing up, it was a beautiful object, it was a nineteen thirties art deco piece. It was a treasured possession of my mum’s. It WAS a treasured possession. So when I was about three years old, we had the decorators in to paint the landing and to give it a bit of a tidy up. One of the decorators had put the teapot on the floor. I think you might be able to see where this is going, so into the room I come, and obviously to my three year old brain, that’s not a treasured green art-dec...

Relationships are a tricky business aren’t they? I’m lucky in that my Mum and I have a very good relationship, I mean like all children and parents we have ups and downs, I can be very blunt, and she can be incredibly irritating. There are a couple of stories that sum up our relationship. Imagine the scene, enters young Graham about eight years old, stage left, with Mum, walking through a forest. Mum is behind me and sees something, a twig in the undergrowth, she pauses, and in her devious mind thinks aha this will be funny, I’ll play a trick on Graham. She sticks a twig up her sleeve that looks like a withered hand and yells out “ooh HELP! My hand!” I turn around, see it and it looks so realistic that I scream and run away crying, mum breaks into hysterical laughter, follows me, tries to console me, and what’s worse, Dad took a photograph of me crying. We’ve still got that photo. Obviously it was meant as a joke, and we’re always playing tricks on each other like that. This ...