Mike's musings

Glueing glasses

Yes, my glasses needed glueing, and as I've recently bought some Araldite, I used that. How interesting is my life? Moo's gone to her Mum and Dad's with Jo, I've done my expenses, emptied (but not repacked) my laptop bag, and I'm watching the Alan Partridge series on DVD. I've tidied the house a bit, too.

I preached this morning on Mark 6:30-44, which is the feeding of the five thousand. I took it in the context of mission. Immediately preceding are two pericopes: the commissioning of the twelve and the death of John the Baptist. If we take the latter as a sign that the twelve are to take over the mission to proclaim Jesus now that John the Baptist is dead, then the feeding of the 5000 is the twelve's first chance to be shine. The use of the word "apostle" is only used twice in Mark - first at their naming, and second in this passage, and tends to suggest "emissaries", according to my Study Bible. I then talked about mission, and how it's a major topic for my year at ERMC, and how it scares me witless. So, I introduced the five marks of mission (from a handout for our summer school):

• to proclaim the good news of the kingdom
• to teach baptise and nurture new believers
• to respond to human need by loving service
• to seek to transform the unjust structures of society
• to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and to sustain and renew the life of the earth

I reckon I can manage these, or at least a bit. I then pointed to the fact that the people in the narrative ate in their hundreds and their fifties. This reminded me of the sermon I gave last week about how we can manage to change things when we work with people of 100 or so. So, we have a scope within which we can talk about mission.

I've not described this very well, but it seemed to hang together OK. We had no organist, so we sang the hymns together - I took the bass part when I dared, and when I hadn't chosen too low a key (and when the pitch that we were singing at didn't drop too low...).

Off to SF tomorrow, then Toronto, then home. Moo's at home with the lovely Jo, and I'm hoping to use Skype to talk to them (and see them).

On another tack, I watched the end of the Open today on TV, and was touched to see Tiger Woods crying when he won. It's his first win since the death of his dad, and although he'd kept things together throughout the tournament, it was clear that the emotion of the occasion really got to him. I think it's really important that men can show emotion.