Through worship, through open, engaged hearts and minds, what we do here on a Sunday is not to be entertained but is to dare to listen and to receive and be transformed.

Perhaps nostalgia is one of the greatest unacknowledged sorrows, temptations, and forces of modern life.

This is a narrative of faith. Faith in the God who never gives up on us. Faith in the God whose mercy was and is and is to come.

Scarcity makes for fear to dominate our thinking and acting. Fear flows from scarcity; faith is rooted in a sense of abundance, of God’s grace and generosity being the most fundamental reality that there is.

There is, I think, something worth noticing in our managers realisation that his only positive way forward is to stop squandering and start having a singleness of purpose.

To be a disciple we are asked to put our connection and relationship with the Divine first, put it before, even, our relationships with the people who we are closest to.

The mystic and the prophet. Each needs the other: without the prophet, the mystic becomes all too comfortable, religion becomes simply an escape from this world of trouble. But without the mystic, the prophet becomes judgemental, haranguing a world gone wrong, without any sense of why it matters, the grace that the world exists in.

Ed Bruce’s dramatic banners, cascading down from the bell-ringing chamber, are a visual representation of that joyful cacophony of sound and skill that is a peal of bells.

Today’s passage from Hosea, is a wonderful proclamation of the forgiving, loving nature of God within the Hebrew Bible. God is tender and gentle and just cannot stop loving the children of God, no matter how many times and how violently God is rejected and replaced by false idols.

Lord, teach us to pray. And in words that have shaped Christian prayer ever since, Jesus offers a few simple direct words to pray; words that can shape us, and form us.

Jesus invites all of us who are worried and distracted and pulled in many directions by the demands of life, to set aside time to rest in his presence, to hear his words of comfort and truth, and be renewed.

The first step on the path of healing is the offering and accepting of hospitality because in that encounter the Divine is both invited and expected to attend.