Two men stand up to pray: one is the epitome of good social standing - the other is trapped in the machinery of economic exploitation, active in the exploitation of the weak as part of the empire system. The first is a popular figure, proud of his strict adherence to Jewish law, the other despised for his part in the corrupt structures of his society. We are granted a privileged view into their internal world - briefly able to hear their prayers - and so learn how even deep religious piety can ignore systemic injustice.

Forty years have passed since the Church of England published the report “Faith in the City’ in December 1985, the work of Archbishop Robert Runcie’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, chaired by Sir Richard O’Brien with Bishop David Sheppard of Liverpool acting as vice-chair. Context is all important as we try to recall what England and its established church were like forty years ago. In 1981 there were riots and disturbances in some of our major cities including Liverpool (Toxteth), London (Brixton), Birmingham (Handsworth) and Manchester (Moss Side). Poverty, inequality and powerlessness was endemic in urban areas according to the Commission. Bishop Sheppard had written his seminal work, ‘Bias to the Poor’ in 1983. The Thatcher government ruled over an increasingly fractured society and quickly damned Faith in the City and its 61 recommendations to government and to the Church. Relations between Margaret Thatcher and the established Church of England had been under severe strain since Archbishop Runcie had acknowledged the Argentinian war dead in the St Paul’s Cathedral service marking the end of the Falklands War. Many bishops opposed the government stand in the miners’ strike. Faith in the City was seen as a clear repudiation of much government policy towards the welfare state and the landscape of deprivation. Such were the times. And this was the church into which I had recently (in 1979) been ordained.

A widow repeatedly petitions an unjust judge until he finally gets fed up and grants her the justice she requests - in a satirical little story about the conditions the poor faced in his time, Luke has Jesus tell his disciples to remain open to the divine and to give an example of the power of resilience. More than a story about individualistic, transactional prayer, this is an object lesson in how to survive in a time when expectations of Messianic return were crumbling and injustice was a daily experience.

His memorial may be over, but the message is not.

The political assassination of Charlie Kirk was a tragedy and reminder that political assassinations have no place in our country. At his memorial, America witnessed authentic grief — but we also saw something more: a chilling example of an empire wrapping itself in the pages of the Bible it never read.

The story of the ten men who got healed and the one who turned back to say thanks is another of Luke’s ‘journey to Jerusalem stories. I will say that the details in this story suggest that Luke was a writer from a different era and geography who wanted to demonstrate that Jesus was no respecter of ‘borders’ of any sort, and who was interested in presenting the mission of Jesus as one of boundary defying resistance to empire.

The lectionary offers us another very familiar passage from Luke’s gospel this week - perhaps familiar because of it’s strangeness. Faith is compared to a mustard seed - but perhaps not in the way that everyone seems to think - and then there’s a bit of problematic chat about enslaved people and their treatment. In this reflection I will mainly focus on the faith like a mustard seed thing offering an alternative approach to the standard view of what Jesus is saying here before very briefly explaining how that relates to the last few verses.

In this week’s reading we get the very familiar story of the rich man and Lazarus from Luke’s gospel. I will say that one interpretation of this fable could be to see Lazarus as a redefinition of priesthood - while a view of the story as a whole could be that it is a layered critique of exclusionary systems. I’ll also briefly explore the idea that the central character is a fusion of characters from Hebrew antiquity and will say that all of this leads to a rejection of the (bonkers) contemporary idea of ‘Christian nationalism’. P.S. As far as I’m concerned it goes without saying that it has literally nothing to do with the idea of heaven and hell.

This week’s gospel passage is a contentious parable with some confusing sayings - in this week’s reflection I disc uss the point of parables, and briefly reckon with the contemporary issues of the Charlie Kirk shooting, the Unite the Kingdom rally, and ask what difference being a Christian makes in my life.

The passage from the Gospel of Luke tells the familiar stories of a lost sheep and a lost coin - but they don’t begin with loss, they start and finish with completeness. The way the writer structures the stories tells us something about the intent - these are stories about the healing of division, and which emphasise the priority of restored community and challenge the tendency to create ‘in groups’ and ‘out groups’.

This week’s text is a provocative passage from Luke, part of his ongoing ‘discipleship’ discourse delivered during Jesus’ long walk to Jerusalem. Luke has Jesus tell the people that they cannot be his disciples if they don’t: ‘denounce their families’; ‘carry their cross’; and ‘give up their possessions.’ Weirdly most of the biblical literalists I know don’t tend to go hard on these particular verses. Shurely shome mishtake!

The lectionary serves up one of Luke’s many dialogues between Jesus and the pharisees this week, this time he tells them a story about who should sit where when it comes to banquets. Big deal? Well maybe, yeah. After all, this goes to the heart of Jesus’ radical teaching, his upside down way of looking at the world. Not for nothing would the shared meal become the totemic institution of Christianity, whether what we are left with really represents Jesus’ radical egalitarianism is worth some thought.

The passage this week is about a healing Jesus carries out in a Synagogue during the Sabbath. Sometimes known as ‘the cure of the bent woman’ it is similar to a slightly later story about the healing of a ‘dropsical man’. I’m interested in the setting of the story, and suggest that it indicates that it is an account based on a historical tradition which demonstrates Jesus’ interest in, and strategy of, changing customs and practises in first century Palestine.

This week I am looking at the passage in Luke which showcases some of Jesus less ‘meek and mild’ attitudes: “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!… Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Rather than accept the prevailing, imo rather shallow, sense that this has to do with religious identity, I see this as a critique of the oppressive power of the family unit in first century Palestine.

This week’s reading is a passage from Luke’s gospel where Jesus tells his people not to worry about having enough. It includes the line: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” There’s a lot of upside down thinking in this passage, and I’m going to say it reflects an ‘alternative narrative’, or a different way of looking at the world to the conventional narrative of economic scarcity.

This week I look at the parable in Luke’s gospel known as the ‘parable of the rich fool.’ Usually this story is used in one of two ways, there’s a prophetic approach (“this story is telling us don’t be greedy, share your possessions,”) and a ‘sapiential’ or wisdom approach (“this story forms part of the wider strand of Biblical teaching which relates to death and possessions.”) Rather than focus on the content of the parable itself, I’m going to comment on the way that Jesus takes a ‘relational’ approach to the issue, which is out of step with the ‘individualist’ approach that dominates the majority of our thinking and our theology.

This week I look at the passage in Luke’s gospel where Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, but has some explaining to do about why even the most basic prayers sometimes fail to get an answer. I explain how I, as an open and relational theologian, address the issue of God’s apparent unwillingness to answer prayer.

This week I challenge the accepted tradition of seeing Mary and Martha as representing simple ‘binary’ opposites and suggest that there are problems with such readings, just as there are alternative reasons to say that, for Mary, silence was the ‘better way.’

I’m at the tail end of the URC General Assembly, where the days have been long, intense and at times emotional, and the nights have been (by my standards anyway) unreasonably late. Nevertheless - here’s my take on the lectionary gospel passage (The Story of “The Good Samaritan”) - please forgive any minor slips which can be blamed on too little sleep.

Although Pentecost is generally attributed as ‘the birthday of the Church’, if Luke’s narrative is to be trusted here it’s clear that the Church was already pretty well developed prior to Jesus’ execution. Indeed it does seem that this is the case, given the network of supporters who enabled his journey Jerusalem

I’ve two fairly quick things to say about this morning’s passage, which is the story in Luke’s gospel of the start of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, during which he passes through some Samaritan villages.