Short Talks
This section of the website comprises short stand-alone talks and articles on different aspects of the Christian Faith, including the teaching of Jesus, the seasons of the Church’s Year and Feasts and Festivals. More talks/sermons/homilies/articles will be added in due course.
The section of the website entitled The Christian Faith provides more extended teaching on larger content areas, such as the Creed and the Sacraments.
The relevance of Bethlehem
“He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God…” (NRSV, John 1:11,12)
The relevance of the Christian religion is to be found at the point where it seems most irrelevant – at Christmas time. What two things could be farther removed, at first sight, than the Christmas narrative and our current age? And it is not merely a question of over 2000 long years separating them. There are other and apparently irreconcilable differences.
The Pharisee and the tax-collector
“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector” (NRSV, Luke 18:10).
The Pharisees were a religious party dedicated to maintaining the Jewish Law and the Jewish way of life, of which the Law was the spiritual basis. They were the successors of a resistance movement which 200 years before Our Lord’s time had heroically and successfully opposed an attempt by the King of Syria to stamp out the ancestral religion of the Jews and with it their identity and survival as a nation.
The dishonest manager
“And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes” (NRSV, Luke 16: 8-9).
This parable of the Dishonest Manager (or Unjust Steward) at first sight appears to present some difficulty because it holds up a dishonest man as an example to be imitated.