shotleyfieldsforever

  Do you remember  Listen with Mother  the programme always opened with the phrase "Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin".   My memory of it brings back strong emotions as I recall as a young child how the ritual involved a sense of snuggling down on my mother’s knee to hear the story being read.   In our psalm today, psalm 34 we are invited to say with the psalmist at verse 8, Happy are those who take refuge in him.   The idea of taking refuge involves quite literally hiding yourself in God or in your parents love.   Which is why I found myself transported back in time to the memory of hiding myself in my Mother’s protection as I was asked ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’   This image of a small child wrapped in it’s Mother’s arms, protected, warm, loved, the sense of being happy, as the psalmist invites us to imagine the possibility of taking refuge in God.   Of being protected, warm and loved which brings with it a deep sense of cont...

  People who like quizzes might prefer me to begin with a question such as: Who wrote a quarter of the New Testament? The answer is of course St Luke. Luke the Evangelist wrote both the Gospel that bears his name but also the Acts of the Apostles. As an evangelist Luke was writing from the perspective of a historian about events that he had not witnessed personally. However his writing in the Acts of the Apostles suggests that he was describing activities in which he was involved. Luke indicates that he was not an eyewitness to the events described in his Gospel he does 'repeatedly' use the word 'we' in describing the missionary journeys that he presumably undertook with Paul and which he describes in the Acts of the Apostles. In Colossians Paul writes: Our dear friend Luke, the doctor, and Demas send greetings.  A near contemporary historian, Epiphanious, suggests that Luke could have been one of the seventy we read about in the Gospel set for the Feast of St Luke. As ...

1 The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.  I followed a tangle of sheep flocking through a town in Spain led by a swarthy suntanned older man, the shepherd. The sheep slowed the traffic right down. We sat engine idling, as the sheep pushed past, nibbling short patches of grass between the cobbles in the pavements. The town was called Alhaurin, an arabic name meaning literally, the garden of God. This was a sermon in the making for the next time Psalm 23 was set as the psalm in ordinary time. But this is no ordinary time this is in fact the most extraordinary of times, this is Covid time, pandemic time, a time beyond any that we have ever experienced. A time that is undermining our economy making our role as consumers more difficult so it is comforting to know that we will get through this.  As the psalmist says we will want for nothing. This is a time when it is a comfort to be able to say together, The Lord is my shepherd. It is a profound statement of faith. The Lord is m...