Dear Friends
I don't feel quite a fraud writing to you in these terms, because my brief time spent with you during the calling process has assured me that I can confidently look forward to beginning many new friendships when I move to Sheffield and begin working with you at St Andrew's. The beauty of friendship, in a world where so many are lonely and isolated, and differences are liable to generate fear or hatred, is that any people can become friends with one another. I'm sure you can think of instances in your own experience where people of different races, backgrounds, ages, political opinions or faiths have become firm friends against all the odds!

This subject in particular is one that arouses strong feelings and prejudices in people who are religious, as well as people who are not. It’s very easy to try to claim our own religion is good for women by comparing it with other religions and making them look worse. But this afternoon I’ll try not to do that, but to look at the question as I have been given it: what is the status of women in Christianity? As we usually do in Christianity, I’ll begin with the Bible. And the Bible contains both bad and good news for women. So I’ll start with the bad news: with Eve.

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;
Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,

I’ve found this talk harder to prepare than most of the others in this series. This is partly because I have no training as an economist, but it may also say something about the difficulties Christians in the developed world have integrating their faith in God and this part of their lives. Jesus said, Wherever your treasure is, your heart will be there; I suspect that, whatever we say we believe, many of us treasure our money and our possessions as much as our faith in God.

Ironically, one of my favourite stories about Jesus adds to our difficulty.

In these talks you’re used to me making a disclaimer about ‘the’ Christian attitude to our topics. It must be very irritating for the Muslims here when I’m forever saying, ‘Well, some Christians think this and some Christians think that’. Can’t you make up your mind? you must wonder. Well, I’m sorry to say that today’s topic is even worse than usual, because the question of ‘the environment’ as we understand it could not have concerned our ancestors in the faith. We live in a world about which we know far more than they did: the centuries and millennia it has already been in existence; the variety and interconnectedness of its species; the fragility of its ecosystems and the dangers that we human beings pose to it.

‘How to be a better person’, like all the subjects we were looking at together before Christmas, is a huge question. You’d be right to ask me, ‘How on earth can you claim to know an answer to that that would satisfy everyone in the world, wherever they are and whatever they believe?’

Christians have the Bible as their holy book – the word Bible means book, though actually it’s a whole library of books, written over thousands of years. And as I said last week, if you’re looking at Christianity you have to start from Judaism, because their holy book, the Hebrew Bible, has become the first of our holy books. The Hebrew Bible starts with five books of the Torah, or Law.

Because Christians believe that the universe has been made by God, we believe that all life has a purpose. The purpose of the natural world is to give God glory by being what it is. Trees grow tall, fish swim, birds fly, flowers bloom and lions roar because they have developed through centuries of evolution - and also because God has made everything in the universe to be as perfectly itself as it can be.

The people of Israel, descended from Abraham and Sarah, had
their beginnings as a poor group of slaves running away from their masters in Egypt. They had
to fight for a land to call their own. But like people everywhere, when the
Israelites stopped being slaves and started to become prosperous, they didn’t
worry too much about social division. The rich became richer and the poor
poorer; some people slept on ivory beds while others lost their family’s land,
and with it any hope of supporting their families. In the end Israel’s kings started playing power politics
with the superpower nations around them – Assyria,

Final epistle

Hi everyone. We return to the UK on Monday so this will be the final letter from Madagascar. We spent a nice time on Ile Sainte Marie with the church centre out there. The centre is on an even smaller island off the southern tip of Ste Marie. You land at the island's airport, walk across the end of the runway and hop onto a canoe which takes you across to the island. No cars and white beaches all the way round. It was idyllic. I preached on each of the Sundays there and we also helped in the work of the centre. In return we were given massive portions of delicious food. Plenty of fresh fish and coconut sauce.