Showing everything tagged as Revd Jonathan Evens

Picture a massive road building project cutting through hills and valleys to create a new straight, level road. The vision from Isaiah that John the Baptist quotes in our Gospel reading is one that seems to require bulldozers. It reads like the specification for a new motorway or by-pass. “Get the road ready … make a straight path for travel.” “Every valley must be filled up” and “every hill and mountain levelled off.” It doesn’t sound very environmentally friendly but, like the current project on the A14, may result in major archaeological finds.   

Advent, the beginning of which we celebrate next Sunday, marks the beginning of a journey that we undertake each year as we travel through the Church Year.

Jesus takes the child’s five loaves of bread and two fish, blesses them by giving thanks for them, breaks them for distribution by his disciples to the crowd, then asks his disciples to gather up the broken fragments of the meal in baskets so that none is wasted.

This weekend, Ali Lyon and I are leading a session at the Parish Away Day entitled ‘Healing, Wholeness and Holiness: many branches: one vine?’

Yesterday Sarah Mullally was installed at St Paul’s Cathedral as Bishop of London. This history-making service was a wonderful welcome to Bishop Sarah and an opportunity to give thanks for all that she will bring to the Diocese as the person that she is and as the first female Bishop of London.

‘The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.’ Jesus repeats the phrase ‘lay down my life’ five times during his discourse about being the Good Shepherd…it is a phrase with multi-layered meanings that have significance for us in terms of laying down our lives and taking them up again.