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  This is a sign in the door of a café in Finisterre. Finisterre means "The End of the Earth", so it's a kind of joke: the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe - Douglas Adams! Geddit? ...Oh never mind. Anyway, when I got to this place the café was closed, and had a sign on the door to say precisely that, but unless you read a little Spanish you might still try the door. That's the thing about signs: they are one dimensional and depend, for their effectiveness in communicating information, on a commonality of understanding between signer and signee. All across Spain we blissfully entered museums by the wrong doors, parked in the wrong places and queued at the wrong ticket windows because our commonality of understanding was somewhat impaired.  But there were other signs we encountered that didn't depend on language.  Like this one for instance.  Walking past this little chapel, on a mountainside at sunrise, I didn't have to ask what kind of building it was. B...

In 1969, when I was 16 I left school and got a job as a labourer. My wages weren't high but to me they were a fortune and within a few months  I bought my first car, a 1938 Morris 8 sports, this one here. It had a minuscule 4 cylinder engine and a wood framed body which meant it was slow and it flexed so much when going around corners that the doors would sometimes fly open. Nevertheless I thought it was pretty damned cool, especially with the modifications I made to the muffler for performance and advertising purposes, ie, removing it.  Back then, the most popular TV program was The Avengers, in which the suave and resourceful hero, John Steed drove a 1928 3 Litre Bentley. Which looked kinda like my car, right? Yeah, right. Anyway, John Steed usually entered his car by leaping nimbly over the door, so I emulated him whenever possible. Now all this is preamble. I want to tell you about something that happened to me one day in Papanui Road, Christchurch. My car ...

    A journey begins for a kotuku So how is it that Jesus is God? How come Jesus is wandering about on Earth, getting hungry, sleeping, only being in one place at a time, getting cross with some people, being kind to others, and all the while he is also the omnipotent, omnipresent, all seeing, all wise God who called the Earth and everything in it into being out of nothing? People have been arguing the toss on this one now for about 2,000 years, sometimes getting very twitchy indeed with those whose answer to that question differs from their own. People with long lists of titles before their names (such as me) or long lists of letters after them (ditto) sometimes pretend to the definitive answer. Let me assure you, as one who has a passing familiarity with all of the most popular answers, they're kidding you. Or sometimes they're kidding themselves, which is pretty much the same thing. My own experience is that the more vigorously people promote a particular answer the less li...

Sunrise in Northern New South Wales The following is my sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral, Dunedin on Sunday April 28, 2019 When people speak of “faith”, what they usually mean is “belief”. So we talk of “believer’s baptism”, or when we want to enquire after someone’s relationship with God we ask, “do you believe in God?” and what follows next is usually a conversation about whether or not God exists. Faith is, in other words, about facts. It’s about the universe as we perceive it, and what happens or not as the case may be. But I think that when the New Testament talks about faith, it’s actually talking about something else. The noun used in the New Testament is pisteuo, which means something like “I put my trust in”. So faith isn’t about belief, it’s about trust. It’s not about struggling to believe a whole lot of stuff which cannot be proven, but it is, rather, an attitude or a way of thinking about what we believe. If you’ll bear with me for a bit I’ll try and expl...

I've seen this picture in the Tate a few times, and love the careful detail, especially in the indignant, resisting Peter. When Ford Madox Brown painted it in the 1850s Christ was clad, as he was in the Gospel story, in only a towel. The public were outraged and the picture didn't sell. Apparently the shock of Jesus' humanity far outweighed the far more significant shock of us being asked to surrender our dearly held ideas of how things should be decently done. As it was at the last supper, so it was in the 1850s. And now. And when you serve And when you serve, Start with the feet And when you serve, Get down low With a towel and a water bowl And when you serve, Find your honour not over But under Not higher But lower Not first But last. So when you serve, Don't wait your turn But push your way Right to the back. Where you'll find Nothing to prove Nothing to hide And nothing to loose But your pride. Yes, you heard, When you serve ...

Later this morning I will stand in front of the congregation of my local parish church and talk to them about Jesus and his unnervingly acccurate estimate of the use by date of the Jerusalem Temple. I will talk about how temples, and other such buildings are the expressions of our hopes and dreams and beliefs and how we get these things hopelessly muddled up with our ideas about God. I will talk about how these psychological constructs are provisional and temporary, and so also are the buildings we express them in. They may last decades, or centuries or millennia, but all of them -ideas and architecture -will fall down one day. I will express my belief that Jesus wasn't being merely nihilistic in pointing this out, but rather that he was inviting his hearers to shift their views: to take their eyes off their own dramatic projections, no matter how impressive they might seem, and place them on the eternity which is lying close to them, hidden in plain sight all about them. Phot...

Wall of a derelict house. In the Maniototo, near En Hakkore retreat centre. I have a new monitor: 27" of clear sharp colour, take a bow Mr. Dell. Today, after a week or two of looking at the thing,  I noticed that it has an adjustable base, so I tilted it upwards a little. And an odd thing happened. The oblong screen became a parallelogram, wider at the bottom than at the top. It didn't really of course, it's just that in the time I had been viewing it the screen had been perpendicular, and at an angle to my line of vision and  my brain had got used to it the way it was, and had, without consulting me, been performing the nifty little trick of making a perceptual adjustments so that it looked rectangular. And now I went and changed the angles and my brain reinterpreted the shape using the old maths. I knew it was rectangular but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't see it that way. The illusion was so persuasive I even got a set square and made sure it was safe ...

For years, I now realise, I have studied the New Testament, but not actually read it. Every time I've sat down with those familiar passages, as I have done pretty much every day for decades, it has been with a  text divided up into chapters and verses by Erasmus 1500 or so years after they were written. Every version of the Bible I own, except one, has copious footnotes and cross references to which I turn when befuddled. So now, I am reading it, not studying it, in the exception, my one version from which all that stuff has been deleted. It's just me and these old words. I'm reading each of the documents of the New Testament in one sitting, and leaving a few days between each one to give a bit of thinking space. This morning it was Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, so Philippians will roll around on Saturday or Sunday. I'll be finished by the end of the month, I think. What has been left out by omitting the divisions in the text and the explanatory material is ...

A couple of days ago I finished reading the First Testament. It's the first time in the history of my devotional life that I have read nothing but the First Testament for such an extended time- about 6 months. And it's the first time I have read it through using the Jewish ordering rather than the accepted Christian one. Take the same elements of a narrative and reorder them and you get a completely different story. We Christians tell a tale of a developing revelation; of a movement from the beginning of all things , through a salvation history to Jesus. The Jewish story is not so much about the past as about the present. It is about the law, by which is meant more than a set of rules and regulations. It is about the great ordering on which the universe is founded. It is a prophetic commentary in which society is critiqued against the standard of that ordering, and it is worship in the light of the law. By and large, I prefer the Jewish system, and wonder if I will ever re...

I didn't record this morning's sermon at Knox church, but this one, delivered while I was Vicar of St. John's Roslyn, covers much the same ground If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element

The following is an address from Knox Church, Dunedin, given on Sunday June 25 2017 If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element Synopsis: We all have our strategies for happiness which give rise to most of the major choices we make. These strategies have a number of things in common: 1) most of us are looking for one of 3 things in an attempt to make ourselves happy. These three things are a) security, b) affection and esteem; c) power and control. 2. These strategies are so deeply ingrained in us that they have become part of us and we are generally unconscious of them. 3. These strategies don't work, because they can't possibly work. Security, affection and esteem, power and control are things we all need, and things our parents give to us, or not as the case may be, from childhood. We usually find ourselves with a felt deficiency in one or more of these areas, and faced with life's inevitable challenges and unhappin...

The following audio file is an address from Knox Church, Dunedin, given on Sunday Evening, June 18 2017. If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element Synopsis: Like many of my generation I entered the Christian faith by way of the Charismatic renewal in the 1970s. In the early 1990s the renewal and I were beginning to part company, and, while I was Vicar of All Saints Sumner, responding to the works of Gerard Hughes and Morton Kelsey, I began to walk the path of Contemplative Spirituality, which I have been following ever since. There is a common perception that the Contemplative path is some sort of modern add on to the Christian faith, but this is inaccurate. Modern contemplatives, such as Thomas Keating and Laurence Freeman trace their lineage back through Thomas Merton to the medieval work, The Cloud of Unknowing , and then, even further back to the great medieval mystics and the desert fathers. In fact, the Contemplative tradit...

Our homes are metaphors. They are statements of our being in the world in much the same way as our clothes are or our habitual facial expressions or our stance and gait. As a parish priest I liked to visit people's homes because I learned far more about people in the first five seconds over their threshold than I would in five years of conversation over coffee after church. It's not about judgement, it's about revelation. It's incarnation, which is the immaterial self finding expression in the material world. Ah. So this is who you are! The one who would live in this place and surround yourself with these things and arrange them in this way. My house at the moment is swathed in scaffolding.  There are guys clambering over our roof and through our doors, changing things and fixing stuff and painting it. It's their music and their conversation which engulf us, and very informative it is, too. The metaphor is perfect. Perfect. Our houses and clothes define us no...

This morning my reading included the most boring chapter in the Bible to date, Numbers 7. I know that when I reach 1 Chronicles there are even greater depths of tedium to be plumbed, in those interminable genealogies, but today it was 89 (!) verses listing what each of the 12 tribes gave as an offering when the altar of the tabernacle was consecrated. Each of the TWELVE gifts are described in excruciating detail, and each of the TWELVE tribes gave exactly the same thing! Aaaarrrggghhhh! For the last couple of days, in Leviticus and Numbers, it has all been laws: laws for priests and laws for people telling each group how to set up and then how to run a system in which to keep themselves pure. It has been about establishing the dichotomy between sacred and profane, and how to police the boundary between the two. There are two very brief references to homosexuality in this regard, and there are lengthy and repeated references to the avoidance of touching corpses, either of humans or...

Sometime soon Clemency and I will have to choose a church to belong to, and at the moment we're not sure which one that will be. I'm not going to try and speak for her in a discussion we haven't reached the end of yet, but for myself, I guess one of the deciding factor s is that I'm a liberal, or at least, that's the label that is least inappropriate for me. On all of the litmus test social issues I can be found on the liberal end of the spectrum, and have been there even when I was a card carrying charismatic/evangelical. On theological issues, things are not so clear cut; although I'm certainly no fundamentalist, I usually feel more at home in theologically conservative churches than in theologically liberal ones . Some of that is about music. True, many modern choruses are musically and lyrically terrible, but modern liberal hymns can be just as bad, or worse, even. For example, I keep my mouth shut instead of singing: "Peace was your plea, and pe...

Every so often a book comes along at just the right time, and this little work by Chester Brown is one of them, though, in this case, it's not for the reasons books are usually helpful. Let me say at the outset that while I admire this book, and found it intriguing, I do not agree with it's fundamental premise. I saw this on a colleague's bookshelf and got myself a copy. It's a beautifully produced little thing; wonderfully laid out with a high quality binding and lovely paper it's one of those books which gives aesthetic pleasure just from handling it. The book itself is composed of a brief graphic novel and end notes, but that isn't really accurate. The graphic novel is actually a series of short renditions of various Biblical narratives, each self contained, but contributing to a greater narrative structure, which is Brown's particular interpretation of the genealogy of Jesus presented in Matthew's Gospel. The drawing is beautiful, and the small ...

Here's a secret. I learned it this past Lent. If you want to change your life, meditate for an hour a day. The changes won't happen immediately but they will happen. Sit still. Stop trying. Don't just do something, sit there . Be quiet for a change. The psychologist Carl Rogers coined a phrase, Unconditional Positive Regard , to express the attitude required of a counsellor towards the one who comes for counsel. By it he meant that no matter what was said or done, the counsellor offers support and acceptance. The extension of this regard gives an environment in which the vast resources within the client can be mobilised for their own healing. I don't know where the humanist Carl Rogers got his phrase from, but it seems that great minds think alike, for this is the attitude God extends towards us. Jesus said, Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life .  I think he meant this: get out...

Forty or so years ago I committed myself to Jesus Christ. A glittery eyed young man led me through the sinner's prayer, in which I acknowledged that pretty much everything I had tried, up to that point, by way of making myself what I hoped I might be had been a bit of a flop, so I acknowledged that and asked God to take over. Since that moment, in the back room of the Assembly of God church in Lower Hutt, a lot has happened. I have been Vicar of 5 parishes, accumulated a few degrees and a roomful of books and become a father and grandfather. I've travelled the world and I've accumulated all manner of nicely framed certificates attesting to other people's confidence that I know some stuff. But really, in all that accomplishment, the one thing I have been trying to do, in everything I've done since that Sunday evening, has been attempting to live up to that commitment.  It is so simple and so hard because I am human. The experiences which have formed me, the ide...

Song: My Love Came Through The City My love came through the city And they did not know him With his beard and his eyes and his gentle hands For he was a working man My love stood on the lakeshore And spoke to the people there And the fish in the water forgot to swim And the birds were quiet in the air. ‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said, But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ - And the fishermen left their boats and came To share his poverty. My love was taken before the judge And they nailed him on a tree With his strong face and his long brown hair And the whiteness of his body. ‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said, But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ - And the blood ran down and the sun grew dark For the lack of his company. My love was only a working man And now he is God on high; I have left my books and my bed and my house, To follow him till I die. ‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said, But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ - Flower...

They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar. Psalm 69:21 Our words come back to haunt us. Even for Jesus. One day, walking through Samaria he met a woman, an outcast, sitting by the well outside of the village to which she both belonged and did not belong. He told her that whoever drank the water that he had to give would never be thirsty. And now, a few years later, an outcast himself, nailed to a cross outside the city to which he both belonged and did not belong he cries "I am thirsty. " For me this is the bleakest moment in a bleak event. This is the time when Jesus doubts everything he has taught and everything he has done. This is, after all that has been heaped on him, his moment of utter desolation and weakness. Here is the ending of all plans and all ambitions. And here's another irony: at the last supper Jesus says, or so Luke tells us, that he will never drink of the fruit of the vine again until the Kingdom of God co...