Just occasionally during the school trips to Russia that I led it was possible to allow the pupils some free time and to have an hour or two of pleasing myself in Moscow. On one of these occasions, I headed straight for the Tretyakov Art Gallery. The painting I most wanted to see was the one reproduced on the appendix to this week’s pew sheet. It’s a fifteenth century icon by the great Russian master Andrei Rublev. It’s usually spoken of as the Old Testament Trinity, though that’s not how Rublev would have named it. In his day, icons depicting...

John 14: 8-17 and Acts 2: 1-21

So we have come to the last, chronologically speaking, landmark date of the Christian year. Without Pentecost, none of us would be here.

Think of those three earlier landmark dates. Just for a moment, forget the wisdom of hindsight. Forget all that we know of things that happened then and have happened since, and think how things seemed to ordinary people at the time.

 Christmas. A baby born in a stable to a poor and obscure Jewish couple in a small town in Judaea. Sure, there were angels and wise men showing that...

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

15 In those days Peter stood up among the believers (together the crowd numbered about one hundred and twenty people) and said, ¹⁶‘Friends, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit through David foretold concerning Judas, who became a guide for those who arrested Jesus - ¹⁷for he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry.’ ²¹So one of the men who have accompanied us throughout the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, ²²beginning from the baptism of John until the day when...

“Oh! I have 3000 friends on Facebook. I feel blessed to have so many friends following me.” 

Perhaps, today, this comment is not uncommon. Having friends numbered in the thousands is for many a badge of honour; even if in reality those with all those friends have never met more than say 2% of all those so called friends. So are those followers actually ‘friends’? 

That is a question that can cause some heated debate and I remember one such debate a few years ago at the Book Festival; when one of our own congregation challenged Rabbi (now Baroness) Julia...