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Lectionary Reflection Year C - A First Monster
Lectionary Reflection Year C - A First Monster
by SPCK - N T Wright
A First Monster Revelation 13.1-10 He wasn’t acting alone. That was the conclusion the enquiry reached after a long investigation into the background of a strange murder in a city street. A foreign diplomat had been stabbed by a young man who ran away, but was caught. At his tria…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Christ the King Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Christ the King Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Christ the King Jeremiah 23.1–6 Colossians 1.11–20 Luke 23.33–43 Today’s passages might, on a superficial reading, simply be making the fairly standard point that Christ’s kingship and authority are a challenge to most human understandings of power. That’s a good and important po…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Christmas Day/Christmas Eve Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Christmas Day/Christmas Eve Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Christmas Day/Christmas Eve Isaiah 52.7–10 Hebrews 1.1–4 John 1.1–14 What difference would it make if the Christmas story were not true? If God had not come to be born, live and die as a human being? Today’s readings shout out that the Christmas story is the key to what the world…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Day of Pentecost Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Day of Pentecost Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Day of Pentecost Genesis 11.1–9 Acts 2.1–21 John 14.8–17 The story of the Tower of Babel continues the theology of sin that is found in Genesis 2 and 3, in the story of the Fall. Eve and Adam’s desire to seize for themselves a knowledge that properly belongs to God alone is at th…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Easter Sunday Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Easter Sunday Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Easter Sunday Isaiah 65.17–25 Acts 10.34–43 Luke 24.1–12 Creation and resurrection are mirror images of each other, and they are held together by the nature and purpose of God. At its simplest, God is Life-giver. That has endless implications and ramifications, all of them glorio…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Palm Sunday Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Palm Sunday Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Palm Sunday Isaiah 50.4–9a Philippians 2.5–11 Luke 23.1–49 Luke’s account of the trial and death of Jesus revolves around images of judgement, and images of truth and falsehood. At the start of the chapter, one trial – the trial conducted by the chief priests and scribes of Israe…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 1 Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 1 Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Proper 1 Isaiah 6.1–8 (9–13) 1 Corinthians 15.1–11 Luke 5.1–11 The question of the correct posture for worship – should we sit or should we kneel – is a perennial one. Well, if anything can make us less sedentary, it should be today’s readings. They are none of them conducive to …
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 10 Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 10 Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Proper 10 Deuteronomy 30.9–14 Colossians 1.1–14 Luke 10.25–37 Does God actually make things too easy for us? Do we keep looking around for the catch, trying to work out what we are missing, when really the truth is as simple as can be? Our human religious instincts tend to go in …
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 11 Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 11 Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Proper 11 Genesis 18.1–10a Colossians 1.15–28 Luke 10.38–42 From the beginning, human beings have been image-makers, instinctively, compulsively making sense of their world through imagining it. In lives governed by the harshest necessity just to survive, primitive people still…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 12 Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 12 Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Proper 12 Genesis 18.20–32 Colossians 2.6–15 Luke 11.1–13 This story from Genesis is often told as though it is about Abraham bargaining with God. Abraham, the generous and merciful, pleads with God, the bloodthirsty and violent, and gradually manages to calm God down and get him…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 13 Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 13 Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Proper 13 Ecclesiastes 1.2, 12–14; 2.18–23 Colossians 3.1–11 Luke 12.13–21 Today’s three readings just are depressing, so brace yourselves. It’s partly because the image of the virtuous life that they present is so obviously unattainable, and partly because they seem to epitomize…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 14 Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 14 Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Proper 14 Genesis 15.1–6 Hebrews 11.1–3, 8–16 Luke 12.32–40 Faith is sometimes presented as necessarily divorced from evidence. If you can prove something, then you don’t need to have faith to believe it. But that doesn’t seem to be quite what our readings today are saying. They …
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 15 Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 15 Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Proper 15 Jeremiah 23.23–9 Hebrews 11.29—12.2 Luke 12.49–56 Hebrews continues its great description of faith in today’s reading. From Moses down to the relatively recent past in the Maccabean revolts, the author of Hebrews reminds his readers of the story that they have inherited…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 16 Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 16 Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Proper 16 Isaiah 58.9b–14 Hebrews 12.18–29 Luke 13.10–17 Can the leader of the synagogue hear himself? Has he any idea what he sounds like? You can feel the silence that ripples out of the crowd as their religious leader tries to persuade them that what they have seen is wrong an…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 17 Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 17 Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Proper 17 Ecclesiasticus 10.12–18 Hebrews 13.1–8, 15, 16 Luke 14.1, 7–14 In this central section of Luke’s Gospel it feels as though Jesus is in a kind of first-century Big Brother. Everything he does and says is being critically watched, sifted, grafted into other people’s fan…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 18 Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 18 Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Proper 18 Deuteronomy 30.15–20 Philemon 1–21 Luke 14.25–33 Which of your letters would you like preserved for a couple of millennia? Philemon is one of the most ‘domestic’ of the documents of the New Testament, and it is impossible not to read it like an unfinished novel. What ha…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 19 Year C
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 19 Year C
by SPCK - Jane Williams
Proper 19 Exodus 32.7–14 1 Timothy 1.12–17 Luke 15.1–10 The shepherd and the sweeping woman in Luke’s stories today are not reacting normally. We are not meant to read these stories and think, ‘Ah yes, I would do just that.’ We are supposed to question their values and then reali…
Lectionary Reflection Year C - Proper 2 Year C