{"id":6358,"date":"2016-12-25T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2016-12-25T11:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turski.me\/?p=6358"},"modified":"2016-12-25T12:00:03","modified_gmt":"2016-12-25T11:00:03","slug":"christmas-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/?p=6358","title":{"rendered":"Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago, I was delivering yet another boring Sunday sermon<\/a>. The final part of it included a story about a grandfather talking to his grandson. The grandfather was a member of the Cherokee tribe of Native American Indians. Only a few days later, I learnt that one of my parishioners had heard the word \u2018turkey\u2019 instead of \u2018Cherokee\u2019 – and had wondered why a turkey<\/i> was talking about two wolves living and fighting within it. The parishioner had only realised her mistake when she read my sermon online! I felt it was definitely my fault, though, as my wooden tongue struggles to pronounce words in English in the right manner.<\/p>\n

\u2018At various times in the past and in various different ways God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets; but in our own time, the last days, he has spoken to us through his son.\u2019<\/i> That\u2019s the beginning of the biblical Letter to the Hebrews and of today\u2019s second reading. It\u2019s a beautifully crafted sentence, proclaiming that God has never tired of his attempts to talk to humanity; on the contrary, He\u2019s been looking for different ways and approaches in order to be heard. The Incarnation of his Son was God\u2019s ultimate utterance, His most direct and the most straightforward. \u2018[Jesus] is the radiant light of God\u2019s glory and the perfect copy of his nature.\u2019<\/i> In Jesus, we are given the deepest insight into God\u2019s love. It\u2019s seemed to be working, as the Christian faith has spread across and around the globe against all odds.<\/p>\n

And yet God remains an impenetrable mystery to many, and that number seems to be increasing nowadays; it certainly seems to be in the UK. Multiple surveys, studies and polls present various reasons for such a significant change in people\u2019s religious attitudes. However, after a few recent referenda and elections here and there, we know how far off the mark the polls can be. In my limited experience \u2013 and I don\u2019t claim to have extensive specialised knowledge \u2013 most people still hold a need for a kind of spiritual aspect to their lives that for generations has been provided by organised religion. So, I\u2019d risk advancing the claim that modern people in general are not less spiritually-minded than they used to be; but that the \u2018language\u2019 we use in the Church has become outdated, and therefore unintelligible to modern people, and consequently meaningless. Think about a situation with a TV signal; to the human ear it\u2019s inaudible, it\u2019s non-existent, it\u2019s totally absent. It means nothing to us in that form. But when decoded with the right equipment it provides us with an abundance of sensations in the form of sound and pictures, not to mention the range of emotional content they relay.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s assume that I can deliver an excellent, interesting and powerful sermon (it\u2019s a purely theoretical assumption – it\u2019s not going to happen!); if I delivered it in Polish, you just wouldn\u2019t get it. That\u2019s why I\u2019ve made the effort to speak your native language. There are still people out there who cannot grasp what I say \u2013 it shows how inefficient my efforts have been. Yet such a failing shouldn\u2019t stop me from trying. It\u2019s the same story with you; \u201ctry, try, and try again\u201d to find new and effective ways to testify to the people around you that God never ever<\/i><\/b> gets tired of loving each and every one of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago, I was delivering yet another boring Sunday sermon. The final part of it included a story about a grandfather talking to his grandson. The grandfather was a member of the Cherokee tribe of Native American Indians. Only a few days later, I learnt that one of my parishioners had heard the word \u2018turkey\u2019 instead of \u2018Cherokee\u2019 – and had wondered why a turkey was talking about two wolves living and fighting within it. The parishioner had only realised her mistake when she read my sermon online! I felt it was definitely my fault, though, as my wooden tongue struggles to pronounce words in English in the right manner. \u2018At various times in the past and in various different ways God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets; but in our own time, the last days, he has spoken to us through his son.\u2019 That\u2019s the beginning of the biblical Letter to the Hebrews and of today\u2019s second reading. It\u2019s a beautifully crafted sentence, proclaiming that God has never tired of his attempts to talk to humanity; on the contrary, He\u2019s been looking for different ways and approaches in order to be heard. The Incarnation of his Son was God\u2019s ultimate utterance, His most direct and the most straightforward. \u2018[Jesus] is the radiant light of God\u2019s glory and the perfect copy of his nature.\u2019 In Jesus, we are given the deepest insight into God\u2019s love. It\u2019s seemed to be working, as the Christian faith has spread across and around the globe against all odds. And yet God remains an impenetrable mystery to many, and that number seems to be increasing nowadays; it certainly seems to be in the UK. Multiple surveys, studies and polls present various reasons for such a significant change in people\u2019s religious attitudes. However, after a few recent referenda and elections here and there, we know how far off the mark the polls can be. In my limited experience \u2013 and I don\u2019t claim to have extensive specialised knowledge \u2013 most people still hold a need for a kind of spiritual aspect to their lives that for generations has been provided by organised religion. So, I\u2019d risk advancing the claim that modern people in general are not less spiritually-minded than they used to be; but that the \u2018language\u2019 we use in the Church has become outdated, and therefore unintelligible to modern people, and consequently meaningless. Think about a situation with a TV signal; to the human ear it\u2019s inaudible, it\u2019s non-existent, it\u2019s totally absent. It means nothing to us in that form. But when decoded with the right equipment it provides us with an abundance of sensations in the form of sound and pictures, not to mention the range of emotional content they relay. Let\u2019s assume that I can deliver an excellent, interesting and powerful sermon (it\u2019s a purely theoretical assumption – it\u2019s not going to happen!); if I delivered it in Polish, you just wouldn\u2019t get it. That\u2019s why I\u2019ve made the effort to speak your native language. There are still people out there who cannot grasp what I say \u2013 it shows how inefficient my efforts have been. Yet such a failing shouldn\u2019t stop me from trying. It\u2019s the same story with you; \u201ctry, try, and try again\u201d to find new and effective ways to testify to the people around you that God never ever gets tired of loving each and every one of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7072,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sermon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}