This weekend I started Philip Jenkins’ fantastic (and very readable) The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. He traces the issues that have divided the global Christian world in modern times: gender, sexual morality and homosexuality, and looking for reasons for why ‘the West’ and […]
Today was the final in the Esther series at chapel. Peter concluded by speaking about the double pain of the story of Esther.
How do you expect God to work? In miraculous healing or in the suffering of the ill? In timely prophecies or in taking words written long ago in Scripture and applying them to our lives? In wealth or in poverty? By miracles or by sustaining creation order? Peter Adam reminded […]
‘For such a time as this’ may be the most famous phrase from Esther. It comes from the passage we looked at in Thursday’s chapel sermon. Taking a ‘slightly experimental’ approach to preaching, Peter told us at the beginning what the application would be, asking us to choose which was […]
Esther 3 is about enemies. We meet Hamaan of course but Peter pointed out that there are two enemies of God’s people in this text: Mr Evil (Hamaan) and Mr Weak (Xerxes).
Following on from Esther 1 on Tuesday, on Thursday Peter preached on Esther 2. It’s the chapter with the beauty pageant to find Xerxes a wife, where Esther’s chosen. In other words, it’s a story about sexual exploitation.
Esther is a pretty difficult book to preach. It’s set in an obscure time in history; it doesn’t mention God; it’s largely narrative with little theological reflection; and the story takes a while to get going. And on top of that, its first chapter records some pretty negative treatment of […]
Meet Jesus at uni 