John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

New Year: seeking out the vigorous Gospel meme

... In our complicated world how can we find the gospel truth and live in its light? I suggest that we simply journey on, and at every twist and turn keep searching for Jesus who always goes on ahead of us to meet us. Our journey cycles on: seeking, finding, losing, seeking, finding, losing, seeking, and if we are prayerfully alert to how the gospel message is being received and used then we should know when we come across fertile ground for loving relationships, for we will find Jesus there; and we should know when we find his message being used for divisive, hateful, purposes, and be aware. ...

- room for Hallmark Christmas romances, Michael Rosen's Scrooge, the Bishop of Liverpool and the #MeToo movement in my talk today, New Year: seeking out the vigorous Gospel meme.

Peace on earth? Starts within

Christmas gives us an opportunity to hone our peacemaking skills - around those tables where we are placed, sometimes uncomfortably, alongside people we may only see once a year - and some of whom we’d prefer to see even less often, if we were honest. 

If we’re honest with ourselves, if we admit to ourselves our reluctance to let old wounds heal, or our strategy of avoidance of people we disagree with, or of avoiding topics we’re uncomfortable about, then we are at the start of building peace on earth. For the beginning of making peace from within is to ask ourselves why we act that way, and prayerfully, carefully, begin to work out what we might be able to do to change.

Peace on earth, goodwill to all - the one born in Bethlehem showed us the way, it’s now in our hands to fulfil it.

- from my Christmas Eve (midnight) talk, Peace on earth? Starts within. Happy Christmas, beloved reader.

John’s Revelation Trumps Empire’s Apocalypse

In light of the reception, by some Christians, of Trump's recent Jerusalem move as heralding the 'end times'...

Now, we can choose to read the Apocalypse of St John of Patmos as a justification of the power politics of our times. Or we can view it as an indispensable source of the enlightening knowledge that while empires will pass away, the Lamb of God holds the world in love, and invites us to live our days with him, in the forgiving and reconciling activities of the kingdom of God’s peace.

- from my talk today John’s Revelation Trumps Empire’s Apocalypse. Thanks to Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire, for the light he brings to the subject of his book; and to Marcus Peter Rempel, whose just-published Life at the End of Us Versus Them: Cross Culture Stories explores Ivan Illich's theme of "the troubled legacy of Christendom ... the terrible perversion that comes of love and truth when these are underwritten by institutional power."