A blog for Holy Innocents Day, December 28 All is calm, all is bright. Maybe it is in the sanitised version of Christmas, with a smiling ox and ass and clean straw, but not in the story in the Bibl… Source: Refugees – MAKING AN ASS OF MYSELF
Christmas songs
It is OK, I am not talking about those pop songs which have been playing on repeat in supermarkets and boutiques since October. Shop workers, you have my sympathy. Nor am I going to pull the lyrics apart because they do not represent Palestine as it was then. I want to look at what is …
The Power and the Glory
It all comes full circle. The Lord's Prayer — Part 18 The Lord's prayer finishes the way it started, with praise to the Father God. Actually, it doesn't, as neither Matthew or Luke finish their version of the prayer Jesus gave with these words. But that does not make it wrong to use it. The …
Contradictions?
Lead us not into temptation (again) ... The Lord's Prayer - Part 17 Wait a minute, doesn't that contradict the rest of the Bible? In giving the Lord's Prayer, Jesus asked us to ask the Father in Heaven not to lead us into temptation. But why would God do this? Does the Bible say God …
Deliver
Deliver us from evil The Lord's Prayer - Part 16 The Lord's Prayer is finished. Or at least it is with Luke's Gospel, which ends with Lead us not into temptation. Matthew's version goes on to say deliver us from evil, or from the evil one. This is not surprising. Matthew was writing for a …
Temptation
Naughty but nice was the advert in the slogan that ran on a series of adverts run through to the 1980s. The idea that eating cream cakes being somehow foreign to me, and also it would seem to me to be foreign to the advertisers too. If you think that cream is naughty you wouldn't try …
Lead
Some years ago I worked in a factory that had some tasks done by robots. The factory was already pretty much mechanised, as you would expect for a company supplying parts to the car industry. But each machine did one simple task. Robots, however, are multitasking. Put in the instructions and off they go doing …
As we forgive those…
This was a blog from last year, 15th December. As it falls into my blog series I am reblogging it. Please note that in that blog I said that this was the only part of the Lord's prayer that Jesus commented on. If you have followed these recent blogs you will know that in Luke's …
Forgive
Being a Christian is not easy. It is never easy even in a western Christianised society, and I would not be like the Apostle Paul and suggest you imitate me as I imitate Christ, because I am not a good role model. The following Jesus thing is something I fail at from time to time, …
Prayer Without Words | The Sound
I came across this on Saturday evening. As my current blogs are on saying the Lord's Prayer, I found this on silent prayer complementary, if more traditional than my usual churchmanship. Amid white noise of day that protects this frail solitude I tatter soil-edged pages of my prayer book opening to empty places praying word-for-word …
Making an ass of myself 