Him needs to buy carrots. Gertrude wrote a letter to she.That pencil is me.
Can you work out what’s wrong with those sentences? Well done. They don’t contain the right pronouns. I’m sure you don’t usually think much about pronouns, but there are a whole bunch of them we use all the time. In fact, there are nine common types of pronouns:
personal pronouns – replace the names of people or things
demonstrative pronouns – point out specific things
interrogative pronouns – used to ask questions
relative pronouns – introduce a dependent clause
indefinite pronouns – refer to nonspecific things
possessive pronouns – show ownership
reflexive pronouns – used when the subject and the object are the same
intensive pronouns – emphasize a noun
reciprocal pronouns – indicate a mutual relationship or action
So, why this lesson on pronouns? Well, simply because knowing the right pronoun can sometimes be a matter of life and death.
There’s no doubt about it, Jesus prayed a lot. And, he encouraged his disciples to pray a lot. I wonder what they were thinking when they asked Jesus to teach them to pray as John taught his disciples? What were they expecting? Were they expecting a formula? A checklist? A manual? A pattern? A fool-proof method? A result?
What do you expect when you pray?
Apparently the average Australian checks their phone 60 times a day and spends nearly 6 hours every day looking at it.
It makes me wonder if Jesus had chosen to visit Martha and Mary today whether Luke would have recorded the visit something like this: Jesus and his disciples entered a certain village where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by the alerts on her phone and the latest memes. Well, there was also the catering to organize on-line, and all those emails, they don’t just answer themselves you know! Martha said to Jesus, “Lord do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? She’s even ghosting me. Tell her to help me”. Jesus answered her, “Martha, Martha, the average Australian spends 6 hours a day on their phone, and you are well above average. Why not put it on Airplane Mode for a while and fly with me instead?
By my reckoning, 6 hours a day is 42 hours a week, is 3 months of the year! That’s a big hunk of life.
A middle-aged woman has a heart attack and it leads to a near death experience while she’s on the operating table. She finds herself standing in front of God so she asks: “Is this it?”
God says: “Oh no. You have another 30-40 years to live.”
When she recovers she decides to stay in the hospital and have a face lift, some liposuction, a breast augmentation, tummy tuck and have her hair dyed. She figures since she’s got another 30 or 40 years she might as well make the most of it. She walks out of the hospital after the last operation and immediately gets hit by an ambulance.
She arrives in front of God again and says: “I thought you said I had another 30 or 40 years?”
God replies: “Is that you Shirley? Sorry, I didn’t recognise you!”
Okay, so it’s a pretty ordinary joke with very dodgy theology. But, it gets me thinking. What if we swap things around? If we are made in the image of God as the Bible says we are, when people see us do they recognise God?
This is the go-to text for any mission director worth his – or her – salt. The title given to this passage in my Bible is: ‘The Mission of the Seventy’. Although, there’s a little footnote that says: ‘Other ancient authorities read seventy-two’. Seventy, or seventy-two? Who’s counting? Well, us, it seems. At least that’s what we’re tempted to do when it comes to mission. The harvest is plentiful, but empty is the pew! Is that what mission is about, then? Well, let’s not discount that altogether, but I don’t hear much counting happening in this mission text.
“Do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”
*Sigh*
You’d be hard pressed to find a more depressingly contemporary question in the Bible. And this from two of Jesus’ disciples!
Well, here’s a contemporary response. A poem by John Roedel . . .
I can’t make the world be peaceful
I can’t prevent children from having to hide in bunkers
I can’t silence the sound of bombs tearing neighborhoods apart
I can’t turn a guided missile into a bouquet of flowers
I can’t deflect a sniper’s bullet from turning a wife into a widow
I can’t stave off a schoolyard being reduced to ash and rubble any of that
the only thing I can do is love the next person I encounter without any conditions or strings, to love my neighbour so fearlessly that it starts a ripple that stretches from one horizon to the next
I can’t force peace on the world, but I can become a force of peace in the world, because sometimes all it takes is a single lit candle in the darkness to start a movement
oh, Spirit, let me be a candle of comfort in this world
let me burn with peace.
Whenever I meet with a couple for pre-marriage counselling our discussion invariably gets around to their families of origin. I always ask: “Who was the disciplinarian in your house when you were growing up?” Twenty years ago when I asked that question the couple generally nominated one parent or the other (most often the father). In more recent times the couple are more likely to name both parents, and if the couple are really young they look at me blankly and ask, “What’s discipline?”
I may be a little old-fashioned but I still believe discipline and love are not mutually exclusive, it’s just that we often get them confused, or we conflate them, or we neglect one or the other.
Which is all very interesting. But, of course, what you’re really wondering is: Who is Neil?
It’s Trinity Sunday which means we celebrate God’s triune nature. What does this mean for us? That would be the question Martin Luther would ask. So, I give to you two quotes often attributed to Luther.
“To deny the Trinity is to risk our salvation. To try to explain the Trinity is to risk our sanity.”
‘Risk’ is a dirty word these days so I think this Sunday I will make sure we will avoid any risk to your salvation, or your sanity! (It’s just not worth the paperwork!) Instead, we might go in a different direction. Luther also said, “Of what help is it to you that God is God, if he is not God to you?” Perhaps that is the question for Trinity Sunday, anyway.
This is a page from a 600 year old document known as the Voynich Manuscript. For centuries it has fascinated scholars mainly because no one has the faintest idea of what it says! It may well contain the greatest wisdom ever written but if no one can understand what it says it simply becomes a historical curiosity.
This Sunday we celebrate the 1,992nd birthday of the church (give or take a couple of years). Let us pray that the church never becomes a historical curiosity.