Ragamuffin ramblings

The gospel, the good news message of Jesus, wasn't just preached by him but embodied by him.  It's message resonated with 3 clear images: death, burial and resurrection.   In our baptism we echo the same pattern and so too our discipleship leads us through the way of death, burial and resurrection - constantly! In so doing we become gospel as our lives repeatedly experience death and loss.  The searing pain of finality can be experienced through the burial of normality (Covid-19), a broken relationship, a lost job and even the deconstruction of some parts of our theology and practice. The burial is brutal because we are left with the empty finality of it.  Yet, even in the most bereft of burials there is a hope, though it maybe at its most diminished it is not yet extinguished, why?  Because even in Sheol, in the depths of hell, Christ has taken its keys so that the place of burial and loss is now under the realm and rulership o...

I've been enjoying the virtual, online services that my friend in Nottingham has been broadcasting each Sunday.   They have stirred the embers and sparked my spirit back to life and I look forward to soaking in thoughtful words through songs, scriptures and sermons.   During a recent sermon my friend Stephen quoted C.S.Lewis.  Nothing unusual there I hear you say, don't all preachers?  However, what made my internal radar lock onto this reading was that I had used it myself a few years earlier. " To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become  unb...

"A Disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” Ever wondered what that phrase “ Fully trained ” meant?
 I had two theological degrees and a thriving ministry, I thought I knew.  In 2015 my world imploded and these words of Jesus were going to take on a whole new meaning. In the original language "fully trained" or  κατηρτισμενος (from καταρτιζω) meant to adjust, adapt, knit together, restore, or put in joint. The word was used by Greek medical writers to signify the repairing of a dislocated finger or joint. It meant to mend something and was applied to the broken nets that James and John were mending ( Matthew 4:21 ; Mark 1:19). “Everyone when he is fully mended/repaired will be like his teacher. ” There’s a journey that we go on when we follow Jesus, it’s a healing journey, a healing of the heart, where what was broken and damaged gets repaired.  Jesus wants us to be like him...whole, nothing hidden, ...