Simon Says ...

Colossians We have been reading Paul's letter to the Colossians in Morning Prayer this week, and a couple of things have struck me. The first is the way that Paul describes salvation in Col. 2.13-15: "when you were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him [Christ], when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it". What struck me here is the way that Paul holds together models of salvation that theologians normally separate. Here Paul speaks of forgiveness in a legal setting (often called the 'Satisfaction theory' of the atonement) and of the triumph of the cross (often described as a Christus Victor model). All of these are dependent on an account of our being raised with Christ. This latte...

More Reading More reading to catch up on from the past few weeks. This is probably very boring for any other poor soul who happens upon it, but it is very helpful and worthwhile for me. 1. Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved This is a beautiful novel, describing love, loss, art and a host of human experience. There were three passages that caught my imagination especially. The first deals with resurrection as the return of life after an experience of bereavement. “I had avoided resurrection because I must have known that it would be excruciating. That summer, light, noise, color, smells, the slightest motion of the air rubbed me raw with their stimuli. I wore sunglasses all the time” (p. 148). I think the way that this combines the positive experience of the return of life with the pain this causes is profoundly moving. The second passage sums up the book for me. It very gently manages to capture and describe beauty, even in mundane and terrible things. “When I walked...

Barth on Preaching I’ve been reading Karl Barth’s Homiletics . This was an unexpected treat. For Barth, “theology as a church discipline ought in all the branches to be nothing other than sermon preparation in the broadest sense” (p. 17). Because all theology should be about sermons, his short account of sermon writing is an insight into all of Barth’s theology. Barth’s theology is focussed on the Word of God, in a three-fold form. The first of these is Jesus Christ, the second is the Scriptures as the witnesses to Jesus Christ, and the third is church proclamation (see especially Church Dogmatics I/1). It is the third form that is in his sights here. “To preach is to tread again with the congregation the way of witness taken by the text. Here the very great burden of the mystery of revelation is lifted from us. What the prophets and apostles heard, we must try and repeat” (p. 104). Although this might suggest that a sermon is nothing more than the repetition of scripture...

Happy Easter (at last) Holy Week and Easter have been hard work, so no blogging for me. Looking back over Lent, there's been the usual failure to keep up all my intended disciplines (although I have still enjoyed stuffing myself with chocolate for the first time in six weeks!). Easter was, however, a time of great joy. I found myself presiding at the eucharist on Easter Day and really enjoying it. It was wonderful. I have been discovering the joy of Easter in the Lenten period - particularly as I made my confession. May the joy of Easter fill all our hearts.

Russian Space Pen When NASA first started sending astronauts into space, they realized that the ball-point pen would not work at zero gravity. A million dollar investment and two years of tests resulted in a pen that could write in space, upside down, on almost any surface and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 degrees. When confronted with the same problem, the Russians used a pencil.