“‘ . . .to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” Luke 4:19

The year of the Lord’s favour: what would the year of the Lord’s favour look like in a neighbourhood, in a church in a person’s life? Wouldn’t it look like a time of community, a time when neighbours, when church members, when families stood beside each other?

The Scripture readings today are about creating a sense of community. The reading from the Old Testament, from Nehemiah, talks about Ezra reading the Book of the Law of Moses …

Lines from David Copperfield came to me forty years after I might have used them

Growing up accustomed to the gentle tolerance implicit in the beliefs of people in rural Somerset, moving to Northern Ireland in 1983 came as a severe shock. Of course, we had all heard of the Reverend Ian Paisley and his ilk, but there was a tendency to imagine that the views he expressed were the rants of an extreme minority and that the majority of ordinary people were reasonable, attached to a rational view of …

The early episodes of the television series Heartbeat seemed to treat of more serious themes than those more recent.  There was a comic element in Bill Maynard’s character Claude Greengrass but the situations faced by PC Rowan seemed more rooted in the realities of rural life.

Religion was still a part of the weekly life of ordinary people.  In Heartbeat country, religion meant ‘chapel’.  In our village in the 1960s, there were three chapels and two churches.  Two of the chapels still function at a reduced level, the church just …