Temple Cloud

Happy New Year!   Are you making any resolutions? Of the various challenges I set myself last year, I seem to have been successful in keeping one: getting back into voluntary work.   I have now been working at the Oakleaf Café for over a year, and at the Sue Ryder shop   for ten months.   In both cases, there were times when I got stressed or close to a meltdown and felt like storming off, and had to take time off until I’d calmed down – but I came back.   So I do seem to be getting marginally better at controlling my temper and keeping a sense of proportion. On balance, it seems to be more helpful to have general aspirations than specific rules.   This afternoon, PDB11 and I have been discussing what we hope to do in the next year, and jotting down intentions like ‘Go for walks more,’ ‘Hoping to go on European holiday by public transport – practise language skills,’ ‘Be more sociable,’ and so on.   Making rules like ‘At least one all-day walk per week,’ ‘At least four hours stud

Okay, I know I set myself a goal of posting every day during Advent, and haven’t done so for weeks.  But in my defence, the date of Christmas (and therefore of Advent) is highly ambiguous.  Still, let’s start with a carol:   Rejoice and be merry in songs and in mirth, O prai se our Redeemer, all mortals on Earth, For this is the birthday of Jesus our King, Who brought us salvation; his praises we’ll sing!   So says the carol .   But of course, we know Christmas isn’t really Jesus’s birthday, right?   After all, the Church just decided to make 25 th December the date for celebrating the birth of Christ because it was already the date of a popular Roman holiday.   (Well, mostly that – it was also that someone decided that for a perfect life, someone would die on the same day that they were conceived, and we know Jesus died in spring, so – let’s say he was born in the winter.)   Still, does the Bible give us any clues as to when Jesus really was born?   Well, some people, su

When I was at school, my classmates (who hadn’t studied the Bible in much detail, but assumed that they knew more about what it said than I did because they weren’t Christians) sometimes tried to tell me that the Bible nowhere mentions the Virgin Birth.  They said that the whole idea just arose from a mistranslation, and that the word translated as ‘virgin’ simply meant ‘young woman’. Like many factoids, this one has an element of truth.   As I discussed in yesterday’s post , the line in Isaiah which Matthew quotes as “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” might, in the context of the original passage in Isaiah, not refer to a woman miraculously becoming pregnant without ever having had sex. Nonetheless, the gospel stories told by both Matthew and Luke do seem to say that Jesus was miraculously conceived without Mary having had sex.   At any rate, they emphasise that he wasn’t Joseph’s son. Matthew tells the story of Mary, a young woma

Christmas is drawing closer.  I accidentally (as a result of missing a bus and needing somewhere warm to shelter) joined the Midsomer Choral Society, with just a few weeks’ rehearsals to go before their Christmas concert .  The main piece we are rehearsing is a splendid interweaving of mediaeval and Victorian Christmas carols, telling the Christmas narrative from the Fall of Adam to Mary’s pregnancy and giving birth to Jesus.  (Now, at last, I understand why the Christmas tree decorations of my childhood included plastic apples – and it wasn’t just because 25 th December is also the birthday of Isaac Newton!) Singing all these sweet, lilting carols about how Mary wouldn’t have been Queen of Heaven if Adam hadn’t stolen the apple, Mary as a spotless rose, Mary getting pregnancy cravings for cherries, Mary singing lullabies to Jesus, and so on, reminds me of a whole set of questions about Christmas.   Was Jesus really born of a virgin?   Did Jesus even have a biological mother?   Does

“Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom the master has put in charge of the servants in his household to give them their food at the proper time?  It will be good for that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns.”  Matthew 24:45-46 Lord Jesus, Help me to share your love and compassion for all people.   Help me to befriend people who are lonely, give to those who are in need, and campaign for justice, because people matter, and not because I want to be rewarded or escape punishment.  Help me to care for the wonderful ecosystems of this planet, which God has given us the intelligence to appreciate, but also the potential to destroy. I know that God sees everything that I do, not just what I happen to be doing at the precise moment when you return to Earth.   Help me to live my life in a way that makes this world a better place. I know that you had physical needs for food and sleep, just like any other human.   So I will trust that when you said in your pa

‘All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.’  2 Corinthians 5:18-19 Reconciliation isn’t something Christians have done well, over the past two thousand years.   Christians have persecuted and murdered Jews, gone to war against Muslims (sometimes massacring any Jews they came across on the way to the Crusades), tortured our fellow Christians whom we suspected of being heretics, and committed genocide against or enslaved followers of tribal religions.   Even now – 190 years after Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act, and 158 years after America ratified the Thirteenth Amendment banning chattel slavery – there are still white supremacists, particularly in America, who believe that black people are fundamentally different from white people and should be, if not

  As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him, but said, “Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” Mark 5:18-19   One problem I have with Christmas is that to me, the Incarnation makes God seem more distant, rather than closer.   I have never thought of God as an old man in the sky watching us from a distance.   If God exists at all, then He is everywhere – around us, and within us. We are often told that Jesus is the one who shows us what God is really like – that everything Jesus is, God is.   The trouble with this is that to me it implies that since Jesus, as a human being, was by definition limited – he couldn’t be everywhere at once, and couldn’t be as emotionally close to everyone he happened to meet during his time on Earth as he was to his close friends – then God is also limited. If you look at it like this, the Incarnation re