Simon Says ...

Came back from wall paper stripping to find this in an email from Paul . Enjoy. Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich are taking a break together, fishing on Lake Geneva. They are having a lovely time, smoking their pipes, chatting idly. It's hot and they are getting thirsty. So Karl Barth gets up, steps out of the boat, and walks across the water to the shore, gets some beers and returns. It's quite hot so the beer doesn't last long. Barth tells Tillich: "your turn, Paul". Tillich gets up, steps outside the boat, walks across the water, and fetches some beer. It is getting really hot now, and the beer is finished once again. Bultmann is beginning to sweat particularly profusely... and finally Barth asks him too: "Come on, Rudolf, your turn now." With a slight tremor in his knees, Bultmann gets up, steps out of the boat, and sinks like a stone. Fortunately he is a good swimmer; he drags himself back into the boat and sulks at the far end. Til...

It's been coming for a while, but it was still a shock. Yesterday was my last day as curate of the two churches I've been serving for the last three and a half years. That's just about enough time to get to know the place and the people, to put down roots and to feel that I'm being useful. It was a day of mixed emotions - excited about the future, moved by the number of people who turned out to my farewell bash, and horribly sad to be going. Just before I got up to preach at the main communion service I was almost in tears, just seeing all the different people from many different parts of the church's life who were there. But it was also a great day. Preaching and presiding at the eucharist for the whole Benefice; lunch in the church hall and ritual humiliation, sorry, entertainment. This included me being taped to a chair by the vicar, some woeful attempts at Geordie accents, and two generations of the youth group having their say. My contribution was at the...

Tonight was the Bristol Theological Society at the Bristol Baptist College, and Paul Fiddes (Baptist theologian from Oxford, who taught me Barth as an undergrad) speaking on wisdom. To be honest, I don't find the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, and especially the Book of Proverbs, very interesting. It just seems disjointed and rather twee. But I found this fascinating. Fiddes compared wisdom and contemporary thinking on the nature of signs. There are some similarities - both see nature as a 'book' of signs. Both also speak of the elusiveness of meaning. There are points of difference as well, not least in the confidence that the wisdom tradition has that it can speak of God, in contrast to the confidence of the likes of Derrida that signs cannot point to anything but other signs. In effect, Fiddes agrees with Derrida that signs can only point to signs. But signs that the wisdom tradition looks to point to the God who is actively engaged in signs because he i...

Christmas greetings (with a New Year delay). This is a picture of something I spotted by our church bins on Christmas Eve. I just wish I knew the story of how it came to be there! A Christmas mystery miracle!