James's Weblog

This fourth talk focuses on the work of the Holy Spirit, as he draws us into the fellowship enjoyed by Father and Son, so that God's greatest gift is himself as he shares his inner life with us.

This third talk continues to answer the question how there can be 3 distinct persons within the Trinity, and yet one God (rather than three). This week, I explain how the Trinity is a Trinity of 3 equal persons, each fully God, and yet in important ways the Father comes first. It may seem that this diminishes the Son (and the Spirit); in fact, this safeguards the full divinity of God the Son, and ensures that there is one God and not several.

The second of 5 Sunday sermons on the doctrine of the Trinity, delivered at St Mary's Kemsing during June and July 2020.

This second talk starts to answer the question how there can be 3 distinct persons within the Trinity, and yet one God (rather than three). The answer in this talk is that the 3 persons always work together, with the consequence that their names of Father, Son and Spirit are absolutely essential. (A second answer to that question will come in next week's talk).

The first of 5 Sunday sermons on the doctrine of the Trinity, delivered at St Mary's Kemsing during June and July 2020.

This first talk shows how the doctrine of the Trinity is not something obscure and best avoided; rather, even if you only met Jesus from one of the 4 gospels you would inevitably meet a Jesus who is part of the Trinity. Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity unfolded by the gospels is accessible and not at all hard to understand.

All of our church services are currently online-only, due to Covid-19.

This morning, rather than preaching on a single passage, I did a topical sermon, unpacking a biblical theology of hand washing.

Another "note to self" post.

PayPal have changed things so that you need a business account to set up an "IPN" notification endpoint. In their own words:

Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is a PayPal feature that sends messages about payments (and other transactional events) directly from PayPal to your website(s)' back-end systems.

For many years I have used Retrospect for backing up our home computers. It's very important to have a thought-through backup strategy, that includes keeping more than one copy of your data, including at least one copy that is "off-site". If disaster strikes, such as your computer hard-drive failing, you wouldn't want to lose all your documents, photos and possibly emails.

Our church produces a quarterly magazine that goes, free, to every household in our parish. It's called The Well.

As vicar, I get to write a letter near the front of each issue, in which I seek briefly to bring a Christian perspective to bear on some contemporary issue or other.

As we sit between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, here's a quotation from CS Lewis classic novel: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (paid link):

I wish to commend to you a new website, Anglican Reality Check. In the past 22 years, a lot has changed in the Anglican landscape at home and around the world. The changes have happened gradually, so that it can be hard to keep track of the key developments that make up the still-unfolding story.