the elves are heading west

Christian Ethics in the Spirit

(This sermon was recorded after the fact – it therefore lacks something of the immediacy of its original delivery)

Freedom through the Incarnation

‘The Dwelling Place of God’

Three Readings . . .

HOPE – “Roll on Heaven, eh? :-)”

TRUST

It’s not the notes, it’s the music – The Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat

Third Sunday after Trinity – Guard your Heart!

The Fertile Void – The Dark Night – Some thoughts

with a confusion of kataphatic and apophatic – it has been some time since I used the terms – and thank you for not commenting 🙂

Fourth Sunday after Trinity – The God of Abraham, the Giver

Following a conversation after church I thought a small additional note might be of some interest. We open with Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (NRSV) ‘Why is it the Free Gift? Aren’t gifts by definition ‘Free’?’ In the Greek, there is a single word, a familiar one to many, Charisma (to anglicize it), with no qualifying adjective. Some translations go with simple ‘Gift’, others with ‘Free Gift’. Charisma is not the only noun in Greek for Gift, this is not insignificant at least in terms of how Greek and English look at the world. In Greek the nouns, we might say ‘carry quality’. Famously there are at least four words for love, each suggesting a different form or quality of the love. So the noun Charisma suggests a particular quality of the gift, that is ‘graciousness’, or perhaps one might suggest, ‘unexpectedness’, pure Gift, out of nowhere, ex nihilo (like all that comes from God). One might go so far as to say that such a Gift transforms how we see the world. In this respect, and co-incidentally the resonance with the Charisma of the Ram caught in the thicket in the story from Genesis, is strong.

Happy listening!