John 14.1-7

Colossians 1.15 – 20

It is a strange story – it is a moving story – it is a story that hits you between the eyes and stops you in your tracks. It is a story that has so much to ask us today.

Because, just recently I was told of a middle aged German who visited Auschwitz a couple of years back. He was looking at the various photographs when became very agitated. When they eventually got him calmed down, he managed to explain that he was looking at a picture of the unloading ramp at the concentration camp. It was there that a SS officer decided who was to live and who was to die. Behind him in the photo was a SS guard taking down the decisions. That man was his father. Now, the visitor went on to explain, that his father would never say what he had done in the war and taken his secret to the grave. They then asked him – what had his father done after the war……….

To read the full sermon please click on:

Broughtystlukes

There can be no more beautiful stretch of country in Scotland than Deeside. And there, presiding over its eastern end, is the ancient fortified tower of Castle Crathes. With its estates almost ‘check and jowl’ with those of Balmoral and one of its rooms still displaying the splendid  bone horn given to the family by King Robert the Bruce after the Battle of Bannockburn., this is indeed a ‘royal’ district.

Yet despite its ‘bonny surrounds’ the mightily built fort holds a dark secret. For high in its bower, is a small room with roof beams adorned with quotations from Proverbs and Bible scenes.  And it was this chamber that once was occupied by a lady who had a child  by a servant. The servant was banished and the woman and the baby vanished to an unknown fate.

Many years later, the Castle was occupied by a Laird had a ‘boodie fear’ – a mortal terror of ghosts. Well, you’ve guessed it, he was the first to the see the ‘Green Lady’. Apparently, she has walked the castle ever since.

Here then is proof of more than every old house has its ghost story and even that in beauty there is ugliness.  Instead maybe we should pick carefully what we fear – for it might just bring it about!

As to the legend, is there any truth in it? Well, when the National Trust for Scotland ,who now manage the building, was restoring the infamous Green Room, they made gruesome discovery. Because under its flag-stoned floor the builders found the remains of a small and unknown child. The lady however has vanished!

On Saturday, I watched a Vulcan bomber zoom around the sky performing some pretty impressive aerobatics. Not I admit, the full sized bat winged warrior from the Cold War. Instead it was hugely impressive model. I say impressive as this replica of an iconic British aircraft had the wing span of a light aircraft and guzzled fuel at a more gluttonous rate.

However, as the model looped and spun about overhead, it was very easy to mistake it for the real thing. In particular, when high in the sky with nothing to give it scale you were sure that this off-stage spectre of the Cuban Missile Crisis drama had come to life literally with a roar.

But the point is anything without a sense of size – an indication of scale – grows to fill the mind’s open space. Certainly that’s true of our daily problems. Now that is not to trivialise the mountains people we constantly meet are labouring over. Yet most of have our normal niggles are genuinely set to nought, say,  against the scale of the drought in Niger; a looming catastrophe likely to cause the deaths of 400,000 children under age 5 alone.

The old adage then that you only solve your problems by looking at those of others is trite and doesn’t always work but, for many of us, it surely helps.

Well it’s that time of year again. Time that is for this year’s Gareth Malone documentary on teaching the world to sing. Well, not the world but some of the most deprived areas of Britain and some of the most disinterested individuals in singing. Yet with   his ventures, he has changed lives and brightened communities forever.

He started with a school outside london and got them as far as a global Choir Competition in China. He got singers from a boy’s school that prided itself on its sporting excellence to the Albert Hall and he took a community choir from dysfunctional ‘new town’ to the Barbican.

Yet despite past successes, each series starts with his dispiriting tour of youth clubs, pubs and schools trying to drum up volunteers who want to sing. This not only takes the fortitude of an evangelical Jehovah’s Witness but also the courage of British Tommies going over the top at the Somme. For example, who can forget him singing a Handel solo to the morning school assembly full of cynical and street-wise kids?

But as each programme unfolds, Gareth is not the only one displaying unadulterated courage, so do the would-be singers that he invariably finds in the least likely places. Many do not make it through. But for those who do we see them changing before our eyes. because, maybe for the first time in their lives, they have found something inspiring, something they want to do and something that is their own. Few will become the Alfie’s & Brin’s of tomorrow, but each will have a better tomorrow.

Nevertheless, the current series – taking teenagers through to singing an opera at Glynebourne – calls for courage from some other people. Since many who attend opera at this expensive venue, will have preconceived ideas of youth. They too will need to have the courage to to be challenged and changed as they are invited into the youngsters’ better tomorrow. For as Oliver Wendell Homes said -’Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions’ .

The problem with education these days is that it costs so much. Or so I thought until a few days ago. It was then I came across a free online resource from the Open University.  Now, since its foundation in the 60′s, the OU has been one of the jewels in the British higher education. Because, established as it was to serve the era of  ‘the white heat of technology’, its real success was in  attracting mature students when to be an undergraduate over age 30 was definitely – as they say in current parlance – not cool.

But the OU did more than recreating ‘maturies’ as students.  For it took the rather seedy world of distance learning, then given the unattractive heading of correspondence courses, and shook it to its foundations. For, arguably, it blazed the trail for the modern multimedia education and online training we can all benefit from today. After all, if you wanted people to enjoy learning after a hard days work, you had to grab their attention with materials that were worth opening up.

However, as I said earlier ‘all singing – all dancing’ courses are expensive.  That’s why the OU is offering such an irresistable bargain.  Because  it makes available online a whole raft of their courses ranging from basic studies skill through to complex computer networking taking in the humanities and the law on the way. There are even student forums and a video conference facility thrown in for good measure.

So if you have fancied dipping your toes into latin, wondered about human consciousness or felt that the Enlightenment is your forte, then put ‘open learning’ into your search engine and enjoy opening your mind to the light of knowledge. What is more, it won’t cost you a bean!

This week’s sermon is now posted at St Luke’s blog:

http://broughtystlukes.wordpress.com

If you think that the vuvuzalas are the rams’ horns of a new spiritual experience, then read this blog and decide for yourself:

http://thefrailestthing.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/is-sport-a-religion/

Victor Meldrew’s catchphrase came straight through my lips. I don’t believe it! For I had just received a huge shock when I was  looking at the templates that came with my new website authoring software. because when I just happened to click on a ‘Contact us’ page at random, there was my cousin’s company’s details. Surely not – he lives hundreds of miles away and we have no business ties. I tried another template – same result.

I phoned him with this remarkable coincidence and indignant at the nerve of the software company to use his details without asking. He was nonplussed – I was nonplussed.

Was the world so preplanned that it could stage this  billion to one chance?  After all, what were the odds that I would buy a package that had used details of someone who I not just know but  was related to?

The penny dropped around midnight!

At Christmas my cousin had visited and done some publicity work online for his firm. Somehow, my newly installed software must have found a ‘contact’ file and thought itself being helpful when it loaded it up and showed it in its templates.

Clever certainly but sadly it demolished a proof  of life as a predestined film running before our eyes.  A movie which manufacturers breathtaking coincidences for reasons best known to itself. Instead,we must look for the divine guiding hand elsewhere and surely in the less trivial.

A very challenging post on the ethics of prolonging life, presented in terms of a pet, is at:

http://wp.me/psYPA-2uS

Worth a read; even more so, worth thinking about.

In a few years time, will silence be extinct?

If that idea interests or concerns you then see this blog by Natural Urban Habitat:

http://wp.me/sY3q