That Doctor Who cliffhanger

Lots of speculation after Saturday’s cracking penultimate episode The Stolen Earth. Is this a genuine regeneration? And if so, who’s going to be the 11th Doctor?

After literally minutes of rigorous conjecture, I believe I have the answer…

A bold move, but the pictures speak for themselves.

Fissiparity

Surely it’s only a matter of time before some biblical archaeologist somewhere uncovers a fragment of parchment with a textual variant for Matthew 18:20…

For where two or three are gathered in my name, there is schism in the midst of them.

Rainbow Cloud

Driving from one meeting to another yesterday lunchtime, my attention was caught by a small, wispy but very bright cloud. It seemed to shine with a green-blue light; over the next few minutes other colours became visible, until all the colours of the rainbow could be seen along its length. Then, after another few minutes, it was gone.

I didn’t have a camera with me, but it looked something like this… only brighter, more vivid.

Its proper name is a circumhorizontal arc, according to the National Geographic:

The arc isn’t a rainbow in the traditional sense—it is caused by light passing through wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds. The sight occurs only when the sun is very high in the sky (more than 58° above the horizon). What’s more, the hexagonal ice crystals that make up cirrus clouds must be shaped like thick plates with their faces parallel to the ground.

When light enters through a vertical side face of such an ice crystal and leaves from the bottom face, it refracts, or bends, in the same way that light passes through a prism. If a cirrus’s crystals are aligned just right, the whole cloud lights up in a spectrum of colors.

It was a thing of beauty, and the privilege of seeing it was a moment of blessing. Deo gloria!

Suggest a sermon topic

So I’ve agreed to take part in a series of midweek lunchtime services elsewhere in the Circuit next month. The series theme: ‘Questions we don’t often hear in sermons’.

I gather that my colleagues have already snapped up the opportunity to explain whether God swears, why God won’t help us win the lottery, and whether there are slugs in heaven.

Since they’ve chosen all the obvious topics, what burning question do you think I should preach on? Suggestions welcome!

Update: In the absence of any better suggestions (well, any suggestions actually), I’m going to go with “Would Jesus watch Big Brother?”

Clerical dress

Well I’ve never seen a bishop’s mitre that looks like this before.

I can see how the chin-strap might come in handy, but I wonder whether it’s just a little too Jean-Paul Gaultier for the Church of England.

Full story here.

An anointed State?

In ancient Jerusalem the dominant description of reality revolved around the conviction that (a) the temple is YHWH’s permanent residence; (b) the monarchy is YHWH’s chosen agent; and therefore (c) the city is safe from and immune to the threats of history. Mutatis mutandis, the dominant description of reality in U.S. society is that (a) democratic capitalism is the wave of the future that is sure to produce peace and prosperity; (b) the United States is God’s chosen agent in the spread of the gospel of democratic capitalism; and (c) the United States is by divine assurance immune to the threats of history. In both ancient Israel and the current sense of self in the United States, there is a theologically rooted exceptionalism that imagines privilege and entitlement of idolatrous proportion… We have, in the U.S. church, spent a very long time ceding over our evangelical voice to accommodation, to an alliance with U.S. exceptionalism and a timid refusal to say what we know most deeply. [W. Brueggemann, The Word Militant (Fortress Press 2007), 18]

Brueggemann writes in and to the contemporary U.S. situation; I as a Briton would be the first to add that his critique applies no less strongly to British colonialism and empire of recent centuries.

Dr Barth and Dr Seuss

The erstwhile Ben Myers has been reading, and asks what Karl Barth and Dr Seuss might have in common. Hmm…

Are your books of any use?
Are they? Are they, Dr Seuss?
Rhymes divine, but logic flimsy:
aren’t your works mere idle whimsy?
Cat in Hat, Things One and Two -
do they speak of what is true?

True, my friend? You ask what’s true?
True is what’s revealed to you.
Logic is not here or there.
Logic won’t go anywhere.
Sometimes what you read won’t fit.
Sometimes that’s the point of it.

Look, here’s Karl. Now gather round:
he will show you what he’s found.
Word is spoken (can you guess?):
God’s big No and bigger Yes.
Yes, I like the Son of Man!
Yes, I choose him, says I Am.

Seuss and Barth and Barth and Seuss:
sauce for gander, sauce for goose.
Thus a simple children’s rhyme
holds a truth to last all time.
Jesus loves me, this I know,
for the Bible tells me so.

Who’d have thought that Fox in Socks
might be neo-orthodox?