Cornerstone, Stone Age, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, Gallstones, Stonehenge and The Rolling Stones. If you’re asked to think of a stone it’s far more likely that one of these will spring to mind rather than the much duller dictionary definition of ‘a hard solid non-metallic mineral matter of which rock is made’.

More than fifty years after it’s first broadcast, the Hanna-Barbera animated sitcom The Flintstones still regularly tops polls among viewers asked about their favourite cartoons. The juxtaposition of primitive technology into mid-twentieth century American suburbs was a ratings winner, although how stone tires on a stone car could get a puncture was never satisfactorily explained!

Whether it’s the main crux of an argument, an alchemist’s dream or a painful medical complaint, the use of ‘stone’ as part of a description often affixes a quality of strength and toughness to whatever it describes.

There is another stone that lies right at the heart of the story of the first Easter.

The bible tells us how following his arrest and sham trial, Jesus was crucified just outside Jerusalem, at a place called Golgotha, which in Aramaic means ‘the place of the skull’. His body was taken from down from where he’s been executed and laid in a tomb. In Matthew’s gospel, we read how a rich man from Arimathea arranged for a large stone to be placed in front of the entrance to the tomb to seal it.

And there the stone stayed, until on the first Easter Sunday two of Jesus closest friends arrived at the place where he had been buried to find that it had been rolled away and Jesus body was gone. Over the course of the following days and weeks hundreds of people met Jesus, very much alive.

For Christians, Easter is the most important day of the year. Yes, we remember the birth of Jesus at Christmas, and rightly so. But on Easter Sunday, which one songwriter has described as ‘the greatest day in history’, we celebrate the amazing resurrection of Jesus. Death is no longer something set in stone.

Happy Easter!

(April 2019)

Raconteur is a marketing agency and publisher who create digital campaigns for various big named brands, as well as smaller brands with big aspirations. Among the content and special reports they produce, one of their particular strengths is putting together lists with all sorts of unusual and unexpected themes.

Back in 2015, they asked various journalists, politicians and authors to vote for who they thought would be the ultimate dinner party guest. The results produced a few controversial surprises. Nearly two years before he became president Donald Trump received a vote or two, as did drug lord Pablo Escobar, outspoken feminist Germaine Greer and outrageous comic Joan Rivers. Quite what the conversation would have been like at a table with those four is something that survey didn’t dwell on, but it’s probably fair to say it wouldn’t be dull.

The final six people who made the cut span the twentieth century, and include guests both the living and the dead. That Barack Obama would get an invite is no great shock.  Author of the Harry Potter books JK Rowling would undoubtedly have plenty to chat to Gandhi about, and Marilyn Munroe could swap fashion tips with pop queen Beyoncé long after coffee and dessert was over.

The final guest was never one to keep his opinions to himself, as on one occasion, former PM Winston Churchill remarked “Dinner would have been splendid…if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, and the brandy as old as the fish”

Among the stories that Jesus told was one about a ruler who organised a great banquet where many important dignitaries were invited. When the day for the feast came, none of them turned up, sending half-hearted apologies and pathetic excuses to explain their absence. So instead the ruler sent his servants out to bring in the poor and destitute of the town, the kind of people that would never normally get a look in at this kind of lavish event.

This is a picture of the life that Jesus invites us all too, and the reality that so many turn him down. We don’t get to choose who our fellow guests might be, but the feast at God’s table is not something to miss! 

(March 2019)

For the incurable romantic looking for a twist on the traditional gift for Valentine’s Day, a rose is always a good place to start. But why go with red? Rose breeders have produced some striking alternatives, ranging from a dark purple to striped white and pink. There’s no shortage of imaginative names for these blooms either, as the ‘Neil Diamond’, the ‘Ketchup & Mustard’ and the ‘Joseph’s Coat’ are all potential choices. When money is no object, one enthusiastic retailer offers a natural rose dipped in 24 karat gold, keenly priced at only £129!

Roses have long been connected with the concept of love. In his poem ‘A Red, Red Rose’, Scottish poet Robert Burns compares a new love to the freshness of a rose. Emily Bronte takes the same rose motif, but it is a broken rose that for her speaks of love. And William Shakespeare, in perhaps the most famous line in his best known play, has Juliet speak of her great love Romeo as ‘A rose by any other name would smell so sweet’.

Flowers can be fragile, fragrant and aromatic, and also stunningly beautiful.

It’s their beauty that Jesus draws the attention of his disciples to when speaking to them about the futility of worry.

‘Look how the wild flowers grow!’ says Jesus, ‘They don’t work hard to make their clothes. But I tell you that Solomon with all his wealth wasn’t as well clothed as one of these flowers’

The tenacity of wild flowers despite their seeming fragility is extraordinary. Even in some of the bleakest of landscapes, on the sheerest of clifftops, it’s possible to find flowers that bloom. Punching through the smallest cracks in concrete or pushing back the boundaries of desserts, their strength works as a metaphor for love itself.

In a month where we particularly acknowledge the love of one person for another, the power of God’s love for us, his creation, despite all we do and despite all we say, is something worth celebrating.

(February 2019)

Pop singer, musician and philanthropist Cliff Richard, the country of Myanmar and New Years Eve have one thing in common. They were all previously known by another name. Cliff Richard was born Harry Webb, Myanmar was Burma and New Years Eve was rather unimaginatively known as Old Years Night.

Spectacular celebrations to mark the passing of another year and the welcoming in of a new one occur the world over, and Samoa in the South Pacific is the first to get the party started. This hasn’t always been the case though. Up until 2010, Samoa was the last country in the world to see the calendar turn from the 31st of December to the 1st of January. Following a government decision, Samoa moved to the west of the international date line, and were subsequently the first nation to see in 2011.

The rationale behind the move was that it put Samoa in the same time zone as Australia and New Zealand, who are their major trading partners. As the Samoan Prime Minister Tuila’epa Sailele Malielegaoi explained. ”While it’s Friday here, it’s Saturday in New Zealand, and when we’re at church on Sunday, they’re already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane.”

The start of a New Year is often a time that people have sought to make a change in their lives, be it diet or exercise or work/life balance, although nothing usually quite as drastic as the change that Samoa made.

In a letter written to some of the first followers of Jesus Christ, the writer describes Jesus as ‘the same yesterday, today and forever’ – God is unchanging. At the same time, in one of the tensions of apparent opposites that Christians so often live with, the bible also records God saying through an ancient prophet, ‘see, I am doing a new thing’.

These two aspects of God’s character are a wonderful focus for the start of a New Year. God continues to act in our world. He creates anew, he finds fresh and exciting ways of building up and strengthening the weak and the weary. He continues to search out the lonely and the lost. And in a world where change is constant and unrelenting, he remains the same God of love.

(January 2019)

Following a recent survey, the retailer Matalan reported that 82% of people own a Christmas jumper and that young adults between 25-34 year were the most likely to purchase one. Over three quarters of people buy their festive jumper to wear for an event at work. More than half wear one on Christmas Day. The options are near enough limitless, from a traditional Christmas tree, snowman or reindeer, to the less conventional ‘We Three Gins’ or Darth Vader in a Santa hat. Even computer game character Sonic the Hedgehog is available for the discerning fashionista looking for an original take on festive attire.  

Although the Christmas Jumper is only a recent tradition, specific clothes worn for a special occasion has a much longer history. 

The first documented princess to wear a white wedding dress was Philippa of England in 1406, although this didn’t become a common choice for hundreds of years, and up until the Victorian Era brides wore any colour they chose. Black was an especially popular choice.

In Papua New Guinea, the coming of age ceremony for boys involves dressing up in a conical hat which has log strands of leaves attached to its edge. Young girls who were transitioning to adulthood In ancient Rome wove and wore a tunica recta, or ‘upright tunic’, to mark the event.

The account of the birth of Jesus, a significant occasion if ever there was one, has just the one reference to clothes which is easy to miss on a cursory reading. The gospel of Luke tells us that Joseph had gone to Bethlehem to register at a census ordered by the Roman Emperor Augustus. While they were in the town, Joseph’s wife Mary gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth.

These “swaddling clothes’ were wound tightly round a newborn. They restricted the movement of the infant and were understood to help babies both fall asleep and then to stay asleep as well.

Which makes Jesus just like any other baby born at that time. He didn’t look any different, he didn’t behave any differently, he was dressed the same. But still angels sang in celebration. Shepherds and kings came to worship him. Even the stars in the sky announced his arrival.

Our Yuletide choice of outfit will say something about how we see the Christmas season, but it’s what we wear in our hearts that speaks of how we see Jesus.

(December 2018)

Interspersed among the cynicism and tiredness that comes across so clearly in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, are moments of humour, glimpses of pathos, as well as passages of insightful wisdom. Over the course of the book, the writer, an unknown preacher, teacher or king explores the meaning of life. He reflects on wisdom and its use, he compares youth and old age, and in the third chapter he records some lines of near poetry that rather surprisingly became a huge international hit for the American folk rock group The Byrds in 1965.

The song, Turn Turn Turn, takes it’s lyrics near enough word for word from Ecclesiastes.

Opening with ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven’ and continuing on listing events and happenings that occur over the course of a life and contrasting them with their opposites, the ‘seasons’ that the author ends with are ‘a time for war, and a time for peace’.

It seems that the writer sees war as an inevitable part of the human condition, just as elsewhere he speaks of other unavoidable facts of life – ‘there is a time to live and a time to die.’

There will be peace. There will be war. It’s going to happen, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Certainly even the most cursory glance at the pages of a history book would lead to the conclusion that humankind’s major instinct is to fight. And as technology improves, there are better and better ways invented to kill more and more people.

Although the individual stories of heroism and sacrifice can be drowned out by the extraordinary statistics of deaths and injuries, our responsibility as inheritors of a society where freedom has been bought at a tremendous price is significant.

In the same passage from the Bible, the writer of Ecclesiastes also says ‘there is a time to kill and a tame to heal; a time to keep silent, and a time to speak.’

As we commemorate the end of First World War 100 years ago, the time to kill and the time to be silent is over. Now is the time to speak up for those who still are affected by conflict in our world. Now is the time to bring healing to relationships broken and shattered by war. Now is the time to pray that that the God of peace will rule in our lives, and those of the whole of his creation.

(November 2018)

Played in Portugal over the course of three weeks in the summer of 2004, the twelfth UEFA European Championship is widely considered to be a remarkable tournament. It featured the then teenage Portuguese sensation Cristiano Ronaldo, French footballing hero Zinedine Zidane, and the home grown English talents of Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerard who all scored for their respective countries. None of them picked up a winners medal that year, as not only did their sides fail to lift the cup, but the highly rated Germany, Spain and Italy were all knocked out in the group stage.

It was Greece, who began the tournament as 80-1 outsiders, who ended up triumphant, beating Portugal by a single goal.

Up until that point, Greece’s impact on the world wide footballing stage had been somewhat lacking. Although they had made it to the 1994 World Cup finals in the USA, they failed to win a single game. They didn’t even score a goal.

The problem seemed to be that Greek football was all about tribal enmity and the loyalty of supporters and players to the three largest clubs in the country, Olympiakos, Panathinaikos and AEK, at the expense of the national team.

Under the leadership of a new manager this all changed. National team first became the top priority, and it wasn’t long after making this the focus that results began to improve. The manager saw his team as a family and the players felt the same way. It made a huge difference.

In the first of his letters to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul explains how we are all needed  to play our part in the Kingdom of God. Rather than a sports team or family, Paul uses the analogy of a body, where eyes ears and hands all have a distinct and valuable role. Every part is needed, every part is wanted. The body is strongest when all parts are working together and left weakened when one is missing.

We all have varied skills and talents, gifts and expertise. When working as a team, where there is both unity and diversity, we should celebrate difference. It is here that our weaknesses are held in others strengths, and all under a God who made us as individuals to work together for his glory!

(October 2018)

If you ever take a cursory glance at the collected musical works of writer and composer Lionel Bart, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he had more than a passing fondness for the exclamation mark. Having had moderate success with both ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ in 1959, and then ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be’ later the same year, the runaway popularity of his most famous work Oliver! just twelve months later encouraged Bart to write the World War Two themed Blitz! Despite a run of more than a year, Blitz! didn’t achieve the global popularity that Oliver! had. Bart put this down to its subject matter resonating more clearly for UK audiences, although playwright Noel Coward described it as ‘twice as loud and twice as long as the real thing’’.

Even with two exclamation marks, his Robin Hood musical Twang!! in 1965 spectacularly failed to repeat earlier success, closing after just 43 performance, receiving scathing reviews, playing to near empty auditoriums, and costing Bart his fortune.

Although less likely to do with avoiding monetary disaster, the use of punctuation to aid in the understanding and correct reading of written text has has been going on for nearly 3000 years. The earliest examples featuring points and strokes to mark the beginning and end of sections. In modern English, punctuations is vital. “Eats shoots and leaves” conveys an entirely different meaning to “eats, shoots, and leaves”.

The bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek The first two without either vowels or punctuation, the earliest Greek manuscripts in capitals and without spaces between words, but with some inconsistent punctuation. The task of the translator and editor becomes harder as a decision to where English punctuation is used can change the emphasis of the text. One passage in the New Testament is a single sentence in the original Greek, three sentences in one translation and more than ten in others.

There are words of Scripture that transcend punctuation. This is from the gospel of John.

God is love and all who live in love live in God and God lives in them

No need for comma, full stop, semicolon or apostrophe, but most definitely worthy of at least one exclamation mark!

Of all the myriad of applications, or apps, that are now available for Smartphones, there are some that are truly pointless.

“Celebrity Heights” enables the user to see how tall famous individuals such as Barack Obama, Tom Cruise or Madonna are, although why you might wish to know that is a mystery.

“Fan Cooler” shows a video of a spinning fan. The angry messages from those who have bought the app, and were then surprised and disappointed to discover that it doesn’t actually produce a moving breeze, is somewhat disturbing. 

“I Am Rich” was a short lived app for iPhones that displayed a glowing red gem which when pressed displayed the misspelt words ‘I am rich. I deserv it. I am good, healthy & successful’ in large text. As it cost $999 to purchase, only those with more money than sense could buy it. Eight people did.

The ostentatious use of money has something of a history.

But a watch is always a watch. It tells the time whether it’s a £20 Casio analogue timepiece, or a £10,000 Breitling Chronomat. A car will still get you from one place to the other, be it a Ford Ka or a Bentley Continental. A Sunseeker Yacht can set you back millions of dollars, but it won’t be much use on the Norfolk Broads 

Choosing the most expensive option doesn’t just say that the purchaser values comfort, style and good workmanship. It also makes a statement about their attitude to excess and conspicuous wealth.

Speaking to his friends, Jesus drew their attention to how some of the wealthier worshippers at the temple made a great show about their giving as they placed their gifts into the treasury. He contrasted that to a widow who quietly put in two small copper coins. She had given more than the others, said Jesus, as they gave out of their riches but she gave all she had.

Winston Churchill once said “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”

As far as God is concerned, it’s not about what you have, but what you do with it, and how you go about doing it as well.

For church junkies who enjoy nothing more than travelling around the country and visiting places of worship – and there are some – the lack of imagination when it comes to the naming of Anglican Churches must be quite striking. St Mary is far and away the most frequently used. More than 2300 churches in the UK are dedicated to her, with the catch all ‘All Saints’ the next most popular, followed by St Peter, St Michael & St Andrew.

This makes it even more noticeable when a church is dedicated to a Saint that is unique to one particular place.

Chittlehampton in Devon is one such village. The eight hundred or so residents live in the shadow of a strikingly large parish church that rejoices in the name of St Hieritha, the only one in the UK with that dedication.

Hieritha was born in East Stowford near Barnstaple in Devon sometime in the 8th century. Having converted to Christianity, she founded a church in Chittlehampton, before meeting her death at the wrong end of a scythe at the behest of her non believing step-mother. According to legend, a spring of water appeared in the place that her body hit the ground – a welcome miracle at a time of drought.

Although the vast majority of church buildings that have been built in recent times are not dedicated to one Saint or another, there is a special place for those that are. They honour the heroes and heroines of the faith. Those that have given so much for what they believe in. Those who we would do well to remember.

I wonder what kind of legacy we expect to leave behind us?

The late American president Ronald Reagan has a Presidential Library and Center for Public Affairs named after him. Another President, Herbert Hoover, will be remembered by a dam on the Colorado river. Musician John Lennon has an airport, pop star Lady Gaga a type of fern and Pope John Paul the Second a beetle.

Will we be remembered by the games we won, the business we ran, the families we raised or the money we made? Or might we be remembered for the way we loved the stranger and the outcast. The way that we loved God.

(July 2018)