“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” Matt 10.40.
I gave a sermon review earlier in the week but forgot to mention how impressed I was with my Mother-in-Law. We’d been talking about going to church on the Saturday evening and she suddenly looked at the clock and jumped up to phone a friend. Her friend likes going to church but finds it easier to go when she knows she will see a friend there. We’re all a bit like that. I thought that was a kind gesture. I hope you’re keeping up with your phoning and connecting.
My Father-in-Law has at last got hearing aids. For at least a couple of years there has been this familiar comic sketch resulting him saying ‘there’s no need to shout, I heard you the first time!’ Anyway, he now has these super aids. Genuinely, he looks younger or at least he smiles more and frowns less and feels more included in conversation. Mysteriously these hearing aids connect to his phone by Bluetooth so that he doesn’t need to hold the phone to his ear. He doesn’t even need to be in the same room as his phone. He wandered into the kitchen whilst speaking to someone else and you could tell he loved it. And that got me thinking: Oh that we might all have Bluetooth hearing aids that connected us to God’s Spirit!
Three books for you.
- Don’t bother with: Frances Young’s From Nicaea to Chalcedon. This is an awesome 400 page scholarly work taking the reader through the saints and heretics and issues of the theological debates that ran from 325 with the Nicene Creed through the 451 and the Synod at Chalcedon. It wont especially help you understand our Sunday Creed, its just too deep for that. It is perhaps useful if you’re writing one of my Church History assignments (only one more to mark) but even there you wouldn’t be reading it all.
- Buy this one: The Church of Tomorrow by John McGinley. I’ve started reading this. Its very good. I will write a fuller review another time. If you were wondering about what to read over the summer. This is the book for you.
- How to be Ace. A memoir of Growing up Asexual by Rebecca Burgess. This isn’t a Christian (or an anti) book. It’s a biography in the style of a graphic novel about Rebecca as she emerges from secondary school and moves into University and understands who she is and how she relates to herself and others. I hope that the Library might have a copy of it as I think its brilliant. We live in a sex-mad world where even in the simplest kindest way people ask us about our kids and if they have a girl/boyfriend etc. But here’s a book that reminds us that there are plenty of people whose lives don’t revolve around that sort of thing.
Keep welcoming each other.
(Photo is of the ceiling of above the tomb in the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem)