(Genesis 22.1-19) 28 June 2020Neil Millar This reading is surely one of the most confronting in all of Scripture. Its Jewish title is ‘the Akedah’ (the binding of Isaac), and I spent a year studying this text at St Mark’s. It fascinates and baffles me, and over the years, philosophers, poets, preachers, painters, singers and … [Read more…]
Pentecost 3 – (Matthew 10.24-39)June 21 2020Neil Millar Matthew chapter 10 is full of words that are familiar to most of us in the Christian church. One wonders if they were all originally spoken together as they appear here? More likely they were disconnected sayings which have been woven together here as a kind of … [Read more…]
Pentecost 2 (Matthew 9.35-10.4)14 June 2020Neil Millar ‘The church today is not as enthusiastic about mission as she was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, FD Bruner writes in his commentary on Matthew (2004.445). There are reasons for this, including our growing awareness of how earlier missionary endeavours were often tainted by imperialistic thinking … [Read more…]
(1 John 4.16-21) June 7 2020Sarah Bachelard How familiar are these words – ‘God is love’. Plastered on Sunday school walls and bumper stickers, it’s Christianity’s best-known slogan. But how hard it is to take in. Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests how not to hear it: he writes, ‘we must exclude any definitions [of this love in … [Read more…]
(Acts 2.1-21)Neil Millar – 31 May, 2020 In their book, The Holy Spirit, published in 2015, American theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon claim their intention is not to write something new but rather to remind believing communities of what they may have forgotten about the place and role of Holy Spirit. We are all … [Read more…]
(Acts 1.6-11) Ascension/Easter 7Neil Millar (24 May 2020) In the two volumes written by Luke in the New Testament, the story of Jesus’s ascension functions as a literary lynchpin. Volume one, the gospel of Luke, ends with a description of Jesus being ‘carried up into heaven’ (Lk 24.51), and volume two, the Acts of the … [Read more…]
(Psalm 66) 10 May 2020Jill Sutton Dearest friends at St Ninians, Neil has asked me to do this little reflection because I boasted to him about getting a letter published on the website of an organisation called Christians for an Ethical Society. I am only on the committee of that organisation because of the goodwill … [Read more…]
(John 10.1-10) 3 May 2020Neil Millar In rural Australia we tend to drove and corral sheep using dogs, horses and utes. In many other parts of the world it’s not like that. Two years ago, almost to the day, I was on pilgrimage across the plains of La Mancha in Spain, when I saw a … [Read more…]
Reflection for Easter 326 April 2020 – Neil Millar It’s interesting to think about the situations described in the Bible when God appeared to humans. ‘The men and women involved in most of those appearances were not leading necessarily wonderful lives’, writes Emily Sax in her blog To Unearth. ‘God did not appear to and … [Read more…]
(John 20.19-31) – Easter 2 Reflection(19 April 2020) – Neil Millar In Chapter 20 of John’s gospel there are four vignettes of resurrection – four brief scenes offered as testimony that Jesus has been raised from the dead. First, there’s Mary Magdalene’s pre-dawn discovery of the stone rolled away from the tomb and the race … [Read more…]