to know, grow and show the love of God
What is important to you? What is worth fighting for? What would make you be determined and persistent, not give up on, not be put off until you got it sorted?
Is there something that you are so passionate about that you would stick with it and be prepared to struggle for as long as it takes? What would make you like a terrier who has got a shoe in his teeth and won’t let go?
Into the story comes a tiny, unnamed, Israelite slave girl.
She would have been on the bottom rung of society, if she was on the ladder at all. A slave, female, foreign and young. In modern parlance we’d say she’d been trafficked.
And that should bring us up short. It’s too easy to dismiss slavery as something which happened hundreds or thousands of years ago. Another time, another place.
But this still happens today. It should still make us uncomfortable.
The message from Nigel and I is: go, share your experience, tell about what you’ve seen, testify to what you know to be true.
Because whether you know it or not, or like it or not, you’re all preachers! You each have a story to tell, a testimony to give.
It can be over a cup of coffee or at the checkout or from a lectern or a pulpit. But go.
In my former life as a teacher I often encountered pupils who found it difficult to grasp the ideas I was trying to get across. Notably when I tried to differentiate between diffusion and osmosis. It’s a difficult concept but relax, I am not going to give you a biology lesson. Their responses ranged from “I don’t understand Miss” through, “I don’t get it Miss” to “This is doing my head in Miss” I know how they felt.
When I first looked at our readings for today, I thought “O Good, the gospel of Luke. It will be a nice parable. But Oh no. A very difficult piece –and when I read the other passages it did not get much better”
I didn’t get it. It was doing my head in.
I am going to start my stopwatch…
I read an article recently that said in the year 2000, TV adverts had to grab a persons’ attention within 12 seconds or they weren’t effective.
By 2013 that had dropped to 8 seconds. The attention span of a goldfish is said to be 9 seconds. So, longer than humans now…
Stop the clock – 8.75 seconds. The goldfish are still with me but I’ve lost the rest of you!
There are four gospels in the bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Three are similar to each other: Matthew, Mark and Luke. One is very different: John.
Why are there four gospels that are so different and so similar in the case of three?
Historically, this is because of cultural areas that differed and shared documents. But in terms of grace and providence, we have events that are so profound we need to be able to look at them with single lights making a blaze of light that we might understand, and trust, and believe.