Below are some extracts from Rev Sheila Cameron’s sermon on 14 May 2023, when our readings had included Acts 17:22–31 and John 14:15–21.

How we need that “Spirit of truth” that Jesus speaks of in today’s Gospel!The church has always had a tough challenge standing up to the spirit of the age and, as Christians, we need to gather together in places of safety in the midst of the storms of scepticism and materialism that assail us …

In the Easter season we draw inspiration from the Acts of the Apostles, which tells a story of great courage and joy and spiritual power in the face of an equally sceptical audience. Today’s reading starts at the beginning of a great speech by Paul to the Athenians, but the verse just before it gives us an interesting glimpse of life in ancient Athens. The Revised English Bible has the translation: “Now, all the Athenians and the resident foreigners had time for nothing except talking or hearing about the latest novelty.” This was a world very like our own, restless, endlessly seeking fresh stimulation and new versions of everything, unable or unwilling to commit to anything in much depth or settle down in one place for long: perhaps because the one commitment that might be the key to life, the commitment to Jesus Christ, had so far eluded them.

In Acts 17, we see Paul addressing the scepticism of his own age, and pointing to the hunger for truth that lay behind it. The Areopagus was a large rock in the centre of Athens which served as a public forum and a place of trial, and Paul was taken there to be interrogated about the new faith in Jesus and the Resurrection which he had been preaching around the city.

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What is so enormously impressive about this speech is how Paul identified with his audience. He showed them how familiar he was with their thinking; he referred to their commonly held beliefs – that there was a creator god; that this god had no need of anything from humans, including being worshipped in temples built by human hands; and yet this god was available to those who reached out to him.

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Paul won the respect of his hearers, and what an important lesson that is for all of us. In the sharing of our faith it is so important to establish a foundation of common ground with our neighbours, to be friendly and concerned, generous and respectful. We don’t need to quote the Bible or recite the history of the church to explain the gospel. Shared culture, shared history, concern for others, common life experience and above all, willingness to spend time with others all provide excellent starting points to begin communicating our faith by our presence, interest, kindness, good humour and joy.

Do read the whole sermon, which is available at this link.

Our picture is of a stained glass panel that you can see at St Giles’ Catherdal, Edinburgh, made available through WikiMedia Commons at this link.

This is an extract from Rev Sheila Cameron’s sermon on 7 May 2023, The Fifth Sunday of Easter, when she was reflecting on our readings in the light of the Coronation of King Charles III the previous day:

Today, as we look forward to Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit, our readings celebrate the status of Christians as God’s chosen people, divinely gifted, and celebrated in that rich variety of images in 1 Peter: we are not only “the stones that the builders rejected,” but also “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking there are just too many images here to get your head around. But Christians are all these things, because as followers of Jesus, we have been gifted with the Holy Spirit. The journey begins with baptism, and that includes the gift of the Spirit, a sign of which in our Anglican tradition is the anointing of every new Christian with the oil of chrism …

Yesterday’s moment of anointing, or Act of Consecration, was veiled from the eyes of the public, hidden from the cameras, kept as a moment of deep personal encounter between the new sovereign and God. Like our Lord Jesus Christ, King Charles was anointed “not to be served but to serve.” The moment of anointing was similar to baptism, in the eyes of Christians a transformative moment of encounter and divine gifting.

We read in Acts today of one particular life transformed by the gift of the Spirit, challenged in a way that was irresistible. The death of the first martyr, Stephen, is a shocking story, and yet the focus is not on the violence but rather on the radiance that shines from the face of Stephen. He was “filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55). Like Christ on the mountain, he was transfigured. …

Do read the whole of Sheila’s sermon at this link.

Our picture by Matea Gregg is a slightly lightened version of the one made available on the Unsplash platform.

This is an extract from Rev Sheila Cameron’s sermon on 30 April, The Fourth Sunday of Easter, when she was reflecting on the story of Noah told in Genesis:

… Such Old Testament stories are the foundation of our Christian narrative and our New Testament or covenant with God through Jesus Christ. In the first covenant that God made with humans, he reassured Noah, who was a good and godly man, that he would never again destroy the earth; and, as we read in Genesis 9, the rainbow was given as a sign of that promise. The earth had become an evil and violent place but the Flood brought a fresh, new world living in a new relationship with its Creator. Our Christian baptism is a sign of our covenant with God through Christ: a covenant of grace offered unconditionally. All we have to do is accept in faith the offer of salvation through Christ, for we have inherited eternal life by being baptised into his death and resurrection.

The early Christians saw Noah as a character who called people to repentance; according to Clement of Rome, for example, writing around the year 96, “all who listened to Noah were saved.” The Ark soon came to be seen as prefiguring the Church, which came to be called the “ship of salvation.” …

Sheila went on to talk more about the ship image and the church, the way that the “community of salvation” operated and grew in the early church, and about Christ as our only means of access to salvation. Do read the whole of her sermon at this link.

Our photograph is of a section of the 11th-century murals illustrating the books of Genesis and Exodus on the ceiling of the barrel-vaulted nave of the Abbey Church of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, in Poitou, France. If you don’t have time to visit, as your webmaster did, more delightful images can be found at https://tinyurl.com/mtnwjrud.