Memorial Service 2013

All of us, to a degree, suffer from deafness or hardness of hearing, though not in the physical sense.

Sometimes we find it hard to hear what other people are genuinely saying to us – either hard in the sense of difficult, or hard in the sense of painful, and sometimes hard in both senses at once.

Somebody comes up and makes a remark about the weather – and all that we hear, or allow ourselves to hear – is a remark about the weather. “Looks like we  might be getting some rain later” is all that gets through to us, but what he’s really saying – and sometimes we know this and sometimes we don’t – is maybe “I’m lonely. Will you talk to me”. Or maybe “I know that you’re lonely, and I want to try and talk to you”.

But in our deafness, we don’t hear that. We hear the talk about the weather, or the crops, or the family or the ailment but oftentimes we miss what they mean. And more often than not, what they mean is: “I want you to listen to me. I want you to know me.”

When we speak, we’re not just communicating information. We’re also communicating something of ourselves,

Most of the time we’re too busy, or too deaf to pick that up in our conversations, but every now and again something reaches our ears that goes a little deeper.

The writer Fred Buechner tells of a time he went shopping with his wife, and as they stood at the checkout she berated him for adding a tub of full fat cream to the conveyor belt when he was trying to lose weight. “Oh well – you only live once” he said.

“And then it happened” – he writes. “This thing that broke for a moment through my deafness. It was a hot, muggy afternoon and the cashier had been working hard all day and looked flushed and hectic there behind her cash register and the racks of sweets and chewing gum and TV guides, and when I said “Oh well - you only live once” she broke into the conversation and what she said was “Don’t you think once is enough?” – That was it.

And of course, they laughed as she’d intended them to laugh. But afterwards, as he thought about it, Buechner found himself wondering where those words had come from within her. What was she really saying? Was she saying “I’m sick and tired of this job”. Was she saying “You’ve no idea how hard my life’s been lately”. Was she saying “I feel trapped, and I don’t see any way out”?

“You only live once” he said. “Don’t you think once is enough?” she replied – straight off the cuff.

Gets you thinking. Especially on a Sunday like this, when a good number of us are here because someone we love experienced too little of life, rather than too much of it.

Why would she say those words?

Well I guess we all know the weariness that can accompany our living at times. There are spells when life seems almost entirely drained of music or colour. Circumstances weigh us down; responsibility narrows our horizons; the drudgery of routine saps us of joy. Life, in those times, gets reduced to the business of simply getting through the day. If you’re speaking out of that place, small wonder that one life seems enough, or more than enough.

Or sometimes we’re just so busy that we miss life even as it happens to us. We’ve got a full schedule, a busy day, a host of commitments at work and at home. But the danger is that life then becomes a game of join the dots between those different commitments; getting from one meeting to the next, one appointment to the next; one task to the next as fast as possible. Kiss the kids on the forehead at bedtime and then get back to it again.

In the middle of that, even the best and most energetic of us find ourselves wondering if this is the life that we really wanted to have.

“Don’t you think once is enough?” she said. And for that kind of life, I guess maybe she’s right.

 

But here’s the thing. All of us know that life has more to offer than that. We’ve tasted it.

We love; we create; we tend and grow; we nurture, we laugh; we share; we worship; we play; we pray.

There are things we can happily lose ourselves in for hours and hours and they’re as unique as our fingerprints. For me it’s playing guitar or shaping words in poetry. Some of you run, some of you garden, some of you walk, some of you read; others love company or being with family, or travelling, or music.

We cherish those God-given moments and experiences, and when they’ve passed, we cherish the memory of them because they are what makes life worth the living.

And there enough of them, scattered throughout our days like little diamonds, to make the leaving of this life hard to bear for everyone concerned.

Hard for those who have lived out their days. Harder still when someone’s taken young and still with so much living to do.

“Don’t you think once is enough?” she said.

Of course once isn’t enough. It’s not nearly enough. But on this side of eternity, it seems to be all we get.

And if that were the end of the story, it would also be the end of hope.

I don’t decry the work of the humanist folk who take funeral services. I’ve always believed that as a minister, my job in a funeral service is twofold. To do justice to God and to do justice to the person who’s passed on, and I can’t fault the humanists on how well they do the latter.

But at the end of the day, no matter how much bonhomie and celebration there is of the life departed, a humanist service is devoid of hope. In that worldview, the person you loved, in his or her entirety, has ceased to be.

And as the Apostle Paul once said – ‘if for this life only we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men’.

But in Christ, the Christ who IS the resurrection and the life, the Christian dares to hope for more than that.

Fred Buechner puts it this way: “Once before, out of the abyss of the unborn, the un-created, the not-yet, you and I who from all eternity had been nothing became something. Out of nonbeing we emerged into being. And what Jesus promises is resurrection, which means that once again this miracle will happen, and out of death will come another realm of life.”

We live in a cynical, secular age. Any talk of life after death is written off as mere comfort for the gullible. But it’s a brave man who from this side of the chasm dares to tell us what’s on the other side, when he’s never actually crossed over himself.

I came across this wee story the other day which made me smile.

The story is that there were two babies in a mother's womb – we’ll say there was a boy and a girl.

"Do you believe in life after delivery?" asked the boy.

 

“Of course” said the girl. “There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we’ll be later on.”

"Rubbish," says the other. "There’s no life after delivery. What would that kind of life even look like?"

"I don't know” said the girl. “But I’d guess there’ll be more light than here. Maybe we’ll use our legs for walking and eat using our mouths?"

The boy laughed. "That’s nonsense. Walking’s impossible – you know that! And eating with our mouths? Are you kidding? We get fed through the umbilical cord, and any fool can see it’s not long enough to stretch very far.”

"Well I think there is something more than this, and maybe it's different from how things are in here." said the girl

"Wishful thinking” said the boy. “No one’s ever come back from the other side. Delivery’s the end of life. Once you’re gone, you’re gone.”

"I don’t think so" says the girl "I think we’ll see mother and she’ll take care of us."

"Mother??" You believe in mother? Where is she now?”

“She’s all around us. It is in her that we live. Without her this place wouldn’t even be.”

 "I don't see her” said the boy. “And until I can see her I’m not going to believe that she exists”.

 “I can’t see her either” said the girl. “But sometimes when we’re quiet I’m sure I can hear her and sense her. I know it’s hard to believe, but deep down, I’m sure that there is life after delivery. And I can’t help wondering if part of the reason we’re here is to prepare ourselves for what that life is going to be like”

When it comes to life on the other side, we are all still in the womb. None of us have crossed over, and none of us can speak with certainty . But there is one who can speak with certainty about the afterlife. He died on a Friday and was raised on the Sunday, and it’s in his name that we gather here today. And it’s his voice that I choose to listen to.

And he tells us: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die”

 

“Do you believe this?” – he asks Mary, whose brother Lazarus lay in the sleep of death.

This morning he asks you and me the very same question. “Do you believe this?”.

May God give us the faith to echo Mary’s answer –

 

“Yes Lord. I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world”.

(This sermon draws from a sermon by Fred Buechner called 'The Killing of Time')

The Power of Words

The other week, my youngest came home from school having learned a little sign language, and we ended up talking about Helen Keller who was the first deaf/blind person ever to achieve a university degree.

Helen was born in Alabama in 1880 and she was struck down by meningitis when she was just 19 months old, and the illness left her unable to see or hear. And as we talked about Helen’s story I was trying to get Isla to understand how difficult it would have been to get through to someone like Helen.

If you’re blind, you can still learn by hearing, and if you’re deaf, you can still learn by reading and through sign language. But if you lack both senses, how on earth can anyone get through to you in a meaningful way?

Fortunately for Helen, a young instructor called Ann Sullivan found a way. She would give Helen objects to hold, while at the same time spelling out their names on her other hand. At first Helen didn’t know what was going on and grew increasingly frustrated, throwing the objects away.

But the breakthrough came one day while Ann was pouring cold water over one hand and spelling the word water on the other. In a flash, Helen understood that the motions Ann was making symbolised the idea of water. And from that point on there was no stopping her. From that one spark of insight the whole world of words and communication opened up to her.

Helen’s story reminds us just how powerful words are in our lives, and how much we would struggle without them.

We spend our infancy learning how to name things. If she’s told often enough, the toddler learns that the round thing she likes to hold is called a ball.

Then she discovers it’s a yellow ball. Her naming takes on more precision. And then she realises it’s good for playing with. When she says ‘ball’ and looks at her dad, sometimes he sits on the floor with her and rolls it back and forwards to her. They smile and laugh together. She’s happy.

The naming, the basic information, is where we all start; but even in infancy, we learn that the power of words is in their meaning.

“Ball” means play and fun; or sometimes possession. “My ball!”

Mama means cuddles, love, food, consolation, help, plasters on skinned knees,

We learn that the higher forms of language aren’t so much about giving out information, but forming relationship and meaning.

We learn that our language has the power to move and shape the world, even as we’re being shaped by the words that wash over us.

The words we listen to, and internalise, can have a huge influence in our formation

For good or for ill, I’d guarantee that every one of us here carries other people’s words around with us in our heads.

I mostly enjoyed my education, but my last couple of years at school were made difficult by a wee group of lads who’d singled me out for their own particular brand of nastiness. It never got violent, but the words stung, at the time.

But alongside that, I placed the words of the English teacher I had for my first three years. She was a wonderfully eccentric but perceptive lady who was good fun but didn’t suffer fools gladly. And in her last few days with us she went around everyone in the class and told us - pointedly but not unkindly -  exactly what she thought of us.

 

And when she came to me she said “Paul – you are the essence of a man”. And when the smart alecs started sniggering she rounded on them and said “if you weren’t so stupid you’d realise I’ve just paid him a real compliment!”.

 

And to this day, I still think that’s the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid.

You have your equivalents of that. You have words that echo around in the caverns of your mind. Things that people should never have said to you. Accusations; lies; words that are meant to crush and destroy. 

And words that bring life and hope – words that affirm who you are and what you’ve done and send you on your way with thankfulness in your heart.

Words are powerful because they help to form us.

And they’re also powerful because words are one of the main ways in which we express ourselves.

It’s a standing joke in our house that our eldest daughter’s first sentence was three words –‘need more cake’!

From our earliest years, it’s words that we use to try and express what we’re thinking and feeling. What it is that we really want.

And when we get good at it, or some of us get good at it, we find that we’re able to point beyond the immediate and use our words to clothe our ideas in - to try and express the inexpressible, and put a name to a feeling or a desire that we couldn’t otherwise describe.

That’s why the poets and authors and songwriters are important people to have around, because they take the things we’re feeling and articulate them for the sake of the rest of us who can’t seem to find the words.

And maybe that’s why some words touch us very deeply, at times. Why the lyrics of a particular song stick in our heads. Or the words of a poem. Or the words that person said that were exactly what we needed to hear in that particular moment.

Like a compass needle turning north, we turn to the truth that their words have captured, and we know that it’s a true north. A true word, spoken into our lives. Not just by the person bringing the words, but by the God to whom all truth belongs.

The primary function of language is about forming relationship and meaning.

And more than anything, God wants to draw us into relationship with himself; and I believe that if we listen well to our lives, to the voices around us and within us, we’ll also hear the still small voice of God, bringing us the words that we most need to hear.

And it’s words that are the link between the three Bible readings we heard earlier on in the service.

You might not know the story of Nehemiah because it’s one of the less familiar ones in the Old Testament, but it’s the story of one of the greatest comebacks in history.

The Old Testament is really the story of God’s dealings with the nation of Israel, whom he chose to be an example to all the peoples of the world.

We know the stories of how he saved them from slavery in Egypt and led them through the Red Sea and into the land he promised to give them. And for a while all was well. But over time they began to grow complacent, and in judgement God sent the Babylonians to overrun Jerusalem and carry the people off into captivity.

And there they remained, as slaves, for over 50 years, wondering if God had washed his hands of them altogether.

But he hadn’t. Another power arose in the Middle East – the empire of Persia, and when the Persian armies overran Babylon, their king, Cyrus, allowed a remnant of the Jews to go back home and begin to rebuild Jerusalem.

The work took decades, but eventually, after lots of opposition, the temple and the walls of Jerusalem were restored, and the city was re-established.

 

But now, how were people to live? They’d fallen away from God before. Could it all happen again?

Well that’s why Ezra had the law read to them. The law that many of them had never heard, and others had simply forgotten. The law that had first been given to Moses set out what God expected of his people, and it came with the promise that those who lived within it would be blessed.

To us it seems bizarre that these folk should respond in the way that they did – with tears and celebrations – but the simple truth is this – they wanted to know how to live. They knew they’d let God down in the past and they didn’t want to make the same mistakes all over again.

And here – in Ezra’s hands - were the words they needed. The words that would help to form them, and to set them free.

Now come forwards with me five hundred years. Jesus is standing in the Synagogue in Nazareth, and all eyes are fastened on him

He’s just read a passage from the Scriptures, from the book of the Prophet Isaiah. It was written 7 centuries before his time, but he’d allowed it to seep into his being, and it became his manifesto for life.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has chosen me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind; to set free the oppressed and announce that the time has come when the Lord will save his people”.

I want you to realise this morning that Jesus wasn’t born with those words on his lips. He had to grow into them. He had to receive them for himself and come into an understanding of what God wanted for his life. It took time, and prayer, and dedication.

But those words took root in his life, and from them, everything else in his ministry blossomed.

Now come forward with me another 2000 or so years to last week’s induction of Gillian MacLean, the new minister at Udny and Pitmedden. My good friend Matt was preaching her in. And I smiled when I heard the text he’d chosen. It’s a passage from Isaiah that we’ve talked about often: Isaiah 30:15

¹⁵This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says:

“In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength,
but you would have none of it.

¹⁶ You said, ‘No, we will flee on horses.’

Therefore you will flee!
You said, ‘We will ride off on swift horses.’
Therefore your pursuers will be swift!

Hearing Matt preach had a particular poignancy for me that evening because he’ll be moving back to the States in the summer and all the McKeowns are really going to miss all the Canlis’s. But it was a blessing to hear him reflect on those words of Isaiah and how they’d prepared him to go back to the hundred mile an hour, lets get it done yesterday culture of the States,

Over his time in Methlick, he’s been shaped by those words from Isaiah. He’s had to unlearn the lie that salvation comes by frantic activity; by finding swifter horses. He’s had to learn that salvation is found in repentance and rest, in quietness and trust. Those words have shaped him deeply, and they’ve set the course of his future ministry. Now that he’s grasped what they mean for him, he’s ready to go back home and minister in a different, counter-cultural way.

My argument this morning is simple - words are powerful. They form us. They shape us.

So what words are you living by today?

There are so many words echoing in the caverns of your soul and mine. Some are louder than others. Some are life giving, some soul destroying. But they all have real power. And if we let them, they can set the trajectory for our whole lives

My counsel this morning, is that we need exposure to another word – the word of God, spoken to us in Scripture. A living word that meets us where we are and gives us a wholly different perspective on how things are. A word that reveals a truth we wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

We need to hear those words for ourselves, and we need to hear them often.

Much as we try week in and week out, Peter and I can only offer you what little insight we bring to this business of trying to live a God-centred life.  However helpful it may, or may not be, listening to a sermon can never be a substitute for encountering God in the detail of your own everyday life.

Reading, praying, reflecting. Listening hard to discern what God’s saying to us at this particular time, in these particular circumstances. Sifting experience for valuable truth like prospectors panning for gold. That’s how we grow, as disciples. By holding on to the insight God brings as we listen for his word in our lives. We can encourage one another on the way, but no-one can do that work for us.

You’ll know the old music-hall gag about the Blackpool landlady who asked a prospective lodger “have you a good memory for faces?” ”Aye – why are you asking?. “There’s no mirror in your bathroom”.

 

James says that looking into the word, listening for God’s word, is a bit like looking into a mirror.

And the thing is, you wouldn’t look in the mirror on a Sunday morning and think that’s the job done ‘til next Sunday. So why would you assume that about your soul?

We began this morning by remembering that words are powerful. They have the power to shape our lives.

And we remembered the amazing story of how, with Ann Sullivan’s help, Helen Keller came to understand the significance of words by having cold water poured out on her hand.

Life keeps pouring out on us, all of the time. A constant flow of experience that at times we find hard to process. May God bring us the insight we need to come to understanding, and bless us with life-giving healing words to live by.

God's Questions - "Can These Bones Live?"

The writer Frances Dewar tells of an old house near to where he stays in Durham. Above the front door there’s a painting of a sundial and underneath it are painted the Latin words Dum Vivimus, Vivamus. While we are living, let us live.

I wonder what those words awaken within you.

While we are living, let us live.

For many of us, just hearing those words will be enough to put us in touch with an unnamed yearning that’s a huge part of being human, but that’s rarely if ever vocalised.

We want to know how to live.

No-one really teaches us how to live any more, if they ever did in years gone by.

Once born, we quickly learn the basics of keeping ourselves alive, and if we’re fortunate enough to have good family and friends around us, we can learn a good deal from watching how they live. But that’s not enough to silence the inner voice which tells us that there’s more to know about this business called living.

For all our achievements and accomplishments in life, we know, if we’re honest with ourselves, that we still haven’t got it all together. We’re homesick, not for a place or for a time, but for that integrated, joyful, life-giving person that we long to be.

We catch glimpses of that person now and again, but most of the time we’re so caught up in the business of living and making a living that we forget to live and settle for mere existence. But the yearning doesn’t go away, it just goes underground for a while.

It surfaces in those moments when we know we’ve acted shabbily and wish we'd done better, or when we catch a glimpse of something in another person which doesn’t provoke envy but makes us want to be better people than we are.

It surfaces when we find ourselves wondering where the years have gone, and how we’ll use the time that remains.

It surfaces when we realise that there are depths of creativity or potential within us that we haven’t even begun to tap into.

It never goes away, this yearning. All of us, no matter who we are, yearn to know how to live.

And our text today speaks into that yearning.

Ezekiel’s not a book or a person you’ll be familiar with, I’m guessing. He’s one of the Old Testament prophets, and prophets were a rare breed. Priests were the respectable folk who mediated religion for the masses; by nature, they were conservative.

Prophets had no such inhibitions. They were freelancers; radically allied to God, but never wedded to the religious institution. And they were mavericks to a man – not given to rituals and ceremony but to thundering dreams and visions that carried echoes of eternity. They delivered words from God that no one else dared to say, or even dream of.

Their shuddering prophesies tended to come as warnings when Israel fell into bad ways, or as visions of comfort and hope when all seemed lost.

At the beginning of the 6th century BC, the time that Ezekiel spoke his words, all seemed lost. The Holy City of Jerusalem had been so thoroughly destroyed it was said that a man could drive a plough right across the middle of it and never hit a stone. Thousands of Israelites had been slaughtered, thousands more carted off to Babylon as slaves. Sitting weeping by the rivers; homesick for what they had and for what they’d hoped to become. This was the end, they thought. God had washed his hands so thoroughly of them that there was surely no way back.

Not so.

Against this background of utter hopelessness came Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones: a powerful metaphor of what God would do for his people, Israel. They were dead and buried in Babylon – but he’d pull them together again. He’d rejoin bone to bone, wrap them in flesh and skin, fill them with the breath of life and bring them back to where they belonged. That was his word to them through Ezekiel.

So in historical terms, this prophesy is spoken, first of all, for Israel.

But there’s a part of me, this morning, that wants to speak those same words over the dry bones of the Church of Scotland.

Numerical decline, increasing marginalisation, internal divisions, financial problems, a dearth of spirituality. This is exile, folks. This is Babylon.

I’ll always remember the damning critique I read in a newspaper a while ago which described our situation as one elderly, decrepit congregation collapsing into the arms of another elderly, decrepit congregation until eventually we’re all gone.

Hard words; and these are hard times we’re in. But if it gets us thinking less like priests and more like prophets it might not be a bad thing. If we stop obsessing about running the institution and start listening for what God is saying to us in the midst of this crisis, I think we have good reason to hope. Something new will rise from the bones of the old.

There are some fantastic things going on in many of our churches – many within our own Presbytery. There is growth and innovation, there are people taking risks. But none of that makes the headlines.

Don’t believe the hype. We have eleven folk joining us as new members today, we had four more just before Christmas. There are others who are ready to think seriously about what it means to be a Christian and to take the step of joining our church. To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, the rumours of our demise have been greatly exaggerated!

But that’s not where we going today.

Today, this isn’t about Israel, or about the Church of Scotland.

It’s about you and me.

“Can these bones live?” God asks Ezekiel.

And the truth is, faced with the half-formed thing I call my life, I ask that question of myself all the time. And I’m pretty sure you do too.

Can these bones of mine live?

You know the echo of that question in your own heart. So where do you go to find an answer?

You’ll get plenty of answers from our culture. You want to live? Have an affair. Have another pint. Gok your wardrobe! Get in shape. Buy more stuff. Take a holiday. Do up the house. Then you’ll be living.

Really?

None of those solutions penetrate below the surface of who we are. None of them give us life in our bones, in the marrow of who we are.

It strikes me that there's no shortage of folk wanting to tell us how to find the life we crave, but precious few who are actually living it.

The author Brian McLaren parodies the way the world tries to pursue life and says “It’s ironic, isn’t it? Our bodies grow fatter, we’re all on diets and our souls, meanwhile, go wispy and anorexic for lack of attention”.

“Can these bones live?”

On the evidence of our eyes, we might be tempted to doubt it; but from today’s reading, the answer God gives is a resounding ‘yes’. Yes, they can.

How?

Through God’s Word and God’s Spirit. It’s the combination of word and spirit acting upon us that brings us to life.

“Prophesy to the bones” God says. “Tell them the truth! Tell them to listen to the word of the Lord”.

“Prophesy to the wind” God says. (wind/spirit same word in Hebrew and Greek) “Tell the wind to come from every direction and breathe life into these bodies”.

Word and spirit together bring life - That's what Ezekiel is telling us this morning.

Let me unpack that for you a little bit.

What is this book that’s carried in and deferred to each Sunday in every act of Christian worship? We call it many things – Bible; Scriptures; Word of God.

Is it a rule book? An instruction manual? Required reading for the entrance exam to heaven?

None of the above. The thing this book is most like is a mirror.

And the thing about a mirror is that you don’t read it. It reads you.
It shows up every blemish and wrinkle; every strong line and beautiful curve. It’s utterly uncompromising and honest, and if you can bear to look in it, you quickly discover the truth about yourself for good and for ill. It tells us how things really are.

The Christian way has always been that we find out the truth of who we are by looking into the mirror that is the word of God; not by listening to the voices of our culture which judge and evaluate us. Those voices don’t speak the truth about you and me. God’s word tells us the truth about who we are, and that’s why our first discipline is to learn to engage with it.

But we all know, those of us who’ve tried to read the Bible, that it’s a hard book to read! If you start in Genesis and try to read through you’ll do fine ‘til you get to Leviticus and Numbers at which point you’ll lose the will to live!

There are lots of ways to read the Bible and some are more ambitious than others, but the most important way is to learn to read devotionally. Don’t try to work your way through the whole thing if you’re just starting out. It’s far better to take a few verses and meditate on them prayerfully. Ask God what they’re saying and how they apply to your life today. How will you live in the light of what you’ve just read?

This is where the Spirit comes in. The word of God comes home when the Spirit takes some insight or some phrase you’ve read, or maybe some experience you’ve had, and makes it come alive for you. Makes it speak into your life with a particular significance. You feel enlightened and empowered by what you’ve realised. In your bones you feel a little bit more alive, not just to God, but to the world, to the people around you and to your own life. You feel stronger and ready for what’s coming next.

That kind of reading, along with prayer, is the basic discipline of the Christian life. Putting yourself under the word of God so that his Spirit can show you the truth about yourself and point you towards life. You’re reading not for information, but to help you find that life that you’re yearning for. And if you learn to read that way, you will find it.

The apostle James says as much in the only letter that bears his name:

“Do not deceive yourselves by just listening to his word; instead, put it into practice. Whoever listens to the word but does not put it into practice is like a man who looks in a mirror and sees himself as he is. He takes a good look at himself and then goes away and at once forgets what he looks like. But those who look closely into the perfect law that sets people free, who keep on paying attention to it and do not simply listen and then forget it, but put it into practice — they will be blessed by God in what they do.”

They will be blessed, says James. They’ll discover how to live.

In a few days time getting church magazines, and there’ll be a colourful leaflet in it like this called E100.

Remember I was saying how hard it can be to get into the Bible, well the geniuses at Scripture Union have made it easy for us because what they’ve done is boil the whole thing down to 100 essential passages that will give you the whole flow of the story from Genesis to Revelation.

Each passage will take about 10 minutes to read and there are 50 from OT and 50 from New. The idea is that you commit to prayerfully reading through them over a time period of your choosing, help you develop the kind of practice I’ve been talking about today.

If you’re a member – you’ll be getting one with your magazine, but there will be some at the door as you leave: if you’re here today as a visitor, please feel free to take one on your way out. It might just help you find more of the life that you’re looking for.

Amen and thanks be to God.