SPCK

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - Friendship

by SPCK - John Goldingay

Friendship 1 Samuel 20: 1- 21: 16 I know someone now in her eighties who lived for forty or fifty years with a friend. They had separate jobs, but in the rest of life they were inseparable, involved together in church and social life and spending their holidays together. The frie…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - Everyone Is Against Me

by SPCK - John Goldingay

Everyone is against Me 1 Samuel 18: 17- 19: 24 Last night I watched a Jordanian Oscar-nominated movie called Captain Abu Raed, whose central figure is an airport janitor at Amman Airport (just up the street from Jabesh-gilead, actually). In a subordinate plot point, he gets to kn…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - How to be a Dysfunctional Royal Family

by SPCK - John Goldingay

How to Be a Dysfunctional Royal family 1 Samuel 17: 55- 18: 16 Queen Elizabeth II declared 1992 her annus horribilis, her “horrible year.” The phrase is a riff on the expression annus mirabilis, “miracle year,” the phrase devised by the poet John Dryden to describe 1666, the year…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - How to Recycle Your Killer Instinct

by SPCK - John Goldingay

How to Recycle Your Killer Instinct 1 Samuel 17: 1- 54 It was the Oscars last weekend (I went to a great jazz concert two blocks away, though I was nearly late because of the road closures in Hollywood), and against the odds, The Hurt Locker beat Avatar (which grossed fifty times…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - Yahweh's Good Spirit and Yahweh's Bad Spirit

by SPCK - John Goldingay

Yahweh’s Good Spirit and Yahweh’s Bad Spirit 1 Samuel 15: 34- 16: 23 I was recently reading a profile of Clint Eastwood; it was this profile that made me think about his movie Unforgiven in connection with 1 Samuel 13. In that and other later movies he is both actor and director,…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - When the King Isn't Tough Enough

by SPCK - John Goldingay

When the King Isn’t Tough Enough 1 Samuel 15: 1- 33 According to news reports, at U.S. bases in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in the first decade of the twenty-first century we were engaged in the torture of people suspected of terrorist acts. This involved keeping people in constrained…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - The Fog of War

by SPCK - John Goldingay

The Fog of War 1 Samuel 13: 23- 14: 52 I recently watched a British movie called In the Loop, a Monty Pythonesque version of how we came to invade Iraq. It was a cynical, fictionalized account of how the implications of intelligence from the Middle East got turned upside down to …

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - When the King Has to Take Decisive Action

by SPCK - John Goldingay

When the King Has to Take Decisive Action 1 Samuel 13: 1- 22 Saul mustered the company of those that were present with him, some six hundred men. 16Saul and his son Jonathan and the company that was present with them were staying at Geba in Benjamin, and the Philistines were camp…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - Far Be It from Me to Sin by Not Praying for You

by SPCK - John Goldingay

Far Be it from Me to Sin by Not Praying for You 1 Samuel 11: 14- 12: 25 The day of my wife’s memorial service was also the day I received the page proofs for a writing project. Someone who was reading those proofs, when he heard that Ann had died after living with multiple sclero…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - How Not to Evade the Draft

by SPCK - John Goldingay

How Not to Evade the Draft 1 Samuel 10: 17- 11: 13 I am sometimes asked why I am so involved with the Old Testament, and I have various answers. I may talk about two great Old Testament teachers I had, one at university and one at seminary. I may refer to the fact that I had lear…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - Is Saul among the Prophets Too?

by SPCK - John Goldingay

Is Saul among the Prophets, Too? 1 Samuel 10: 1- 16 For most of church history, visions and prophecies and miraculous healings have been uncommon events in the mainline churches, but during the time when I was teaching in England, they came to be more common once more, and we use…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - How Saul Lost Some Donkeys and Found More Than He Bargained For

by SPCK - John Goldingay

How Saul Lost Some Donkeys and Found More than He Bargained For 1 Samuel 8: 21- 9: 27 A friend of mine begins his church ministry tomorrow, fifteen years after he first had a sense that he might be called to the ministry. Of course he has been involved in ministry in different se…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - Appoint Us a King

by SPCK - John Goldingay

Appoint Us a King 1 Samuel 7: 15- 8: 20 Almost every day, television and the newspapers report the cost that ordinary people pay for their government. Sometimes the cost lies in expenditure that may be inevitable. Representatives have to be paid salaries and expenses and need bui…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - As Far as this Yahweh Has Helped Us

by SPCK - John Goldingay

As Far as This Yahweh Has Helped Us 1 Samuel 7: 2- 14 “Helping” can have a variety of connotations. On one occasion a tire came off my wife’s wheelchair when we were on our way to church. As I was bending down trying to get the tire back on, with Ann still in the chair, a car dri…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - You Can't Mess with the Covenant Chest

by SPCK - John Goldingay

You Can’t Mess with the Covenant Chest 1 Samuel 5: 1- 7: 1 When I used to read Bible stories to my young sons, they would sometimes ask, “Did that really happen?” As far as I remember, they did not ask that question about big events like the Israelites’ crossing of the Reed Sea (…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - The Splendor is Gone

by SPCK - John Goldingay

The Splendor is Gone 1 Samuel 4: 1b- 22 In his sermon yesterday, our rector (slightly apologetically) told us he had been watching a TV series about a psychopathic boy whom a police officer had adopted. The boy’s stepfather gave him a “code”: Don’t kill innocent people; make sure…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - A Summons, not a Call

by SPCK - John Goldingay

A Summons, Not a Call 1 Samuel 3: 1- 4: 1a One of my friends is going through the “discernment process” whereby the Episcopal Church seeks to decide whether she is called to ordained ministry. It involves meetings with a group of people from your local church, with diocesan offic…

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1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - How Not to Display Accurate Empathy II

by SPCK - John Goldingay

It Takes a Miracle 1 Samuel 1: 12-19a A little while ago a woman came to see me to talk about the way her husband was abusing her. It involved some physical abuse; he had hit her once or twice, but the background was not that he was an inherently violent person or a drunkard. The…

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