The bible blog follows the daily bible readings of the catholic Church
Reading 1, Acts 4:32-37
32 The whole group of believers was united, heart and soul; no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, as everything they owned was held in common.
33 The apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with great power, and they were all accorded great respect.
34 None of their members was ever in want, as all those who owned land or houses would sell them, and bring the money from the sale of them,
35 to present it to the apostles; it was then distributed to any who might be in need.
36 There was a Levite of Cypriot origin called Joseph whom the apostles surnamed Barnabas (which means ‘son of encouragement’).
37 He owned a piece of land and he sold it and brought the money and presented it to the apostles.
Luke presents the community of believers as an advance guard of God’s rule on earth. In their partnership with each other, the inequalities and injustices of human society are undone. The poor will never go without and the rich will never possess too much. Why can’t our churches today do the same? One answer for the Church of Scotland to consider, is that we have allowed our parishes to reflect the social divisions of society: some are rich; some are modestly well-off; some are very poor. Very few parishes contain rich and poor. We redistribute wealth (through our contributions to national funds) only for the needs of the church, but not for the need of people. The sense of being one people in Christ is not strongly felt. We need urgently to examine what we mean by a parish. Looking after our own is not the whole of God’s rule, but it would be a real start.
Gospel, John 3:7b-15
The wind blows where it will
7 Do not be surprised when I say: You must be born from above. 8 The wind blows where it pleases; you can hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
9 ‘How is that possible?’ asked Nicodemus.
10 Jesus replied, ‘You are the Teacher of Israel, and you do not know these things!
11 ‘In all truth I tell you, we speak only about what we know and witness only to what we have seen and yet you people reject our evidence. 12 If you do not believe me when I speak to you about earthly things, how will you believe me when I speak to you about heavenly things?
13 No one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of man; 14 as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so must the Son of man be lifted up,15 so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.
The Father’s purpose in sending the son is to give life to the world. The son and the spirit are the bearers of this gift. The son has come from God and will return to God so that the world may be open to heaven and heaven to the world. The son is “lifted up” to go back to heaven, but paradoxically this “lifting up” is death on a cross, out of love for the world. That’s why new life is a birth from above: it lifts us beyond the possibilities of this world into resources of the next, while we are still in this world. The spirit is the sharing of God’s life, which dwells in Jesus and may dwell in us.
If we think that the shared life of the Jesus community in Acts is beyond us, that’s because we are closed to the spirit, and are refusing to be born from above. The new life that is offered is personal, communal, and societal. There is nothing more dismaying than the enfeeblement of the mighty concept of “birth from above” into a “born-again” experience which touches only the emotional life of the individual.
One of the benefits of doing this blog is the rediscovery of how helpful and challenging our scriptures are: they constantly direct us towards the source of life.
Emmock's Blog 
Mike,
Hello again. We had a session meeting last night where we were told that Aberdeen Presbytry were about to review their presbytry plan with a view to loosing 7 ministerial posts due to the funding issue nationally so your comment on the parish set-up is timely.
Have the parishes not developed in line with local authority planning, the cessation of public housebuilding, and the vast shift of wealth from poor to rich,and so in Aberdeen you have the burgeoning private developments in say Cults while Tillydrone has stagnated thus creating the social divisions we see today? The church as I see it is reflecting this division. Certainly in politics, and maybe in the church, power has become concentrated centrally, and perhaps it is time to devolve that control as close to the people as possible so that all feel involved locally and that their input matters and then it becomes more like the community in Acts. Quite how we create that “sharing” via parish redevelopment I’m not sure.
I’ve enjoyed your comments throughout the Easter period. I’d like to respond to your own views on the resurrection but need to gather my thoughts first.
Warm regards,
Stephen.
Thanks, Steve. I’m posting this as a public reply. Parishes in the first 1000 years of Christianity were intended to cover a whole city or rural area, including all sorts and conditions of humanity within their bounds. Of course there were exceptions to, and corruptions of, this ideal. The reformation in Scotland 1560 continued this kind of parish, not least because they didn’t have many mninisters. Prior to 1800 Aberdeen was one parish. Gradually other parishes on its edge and then within its bound were permitted, but very sparingly. The disruption of 1843 and the creation of the Free Church meant that the new middle class was able to create parishes where they wanted. Subsequent reunion in 1929 did not address this problem, and even with the creation of working class and church extension parishes, the streucture of the church began to mirror the structure of society. We need to return to the original ideal of the parish. If Aberdeen or Dundee or The Mearns were parishes, they could assign resources to congregations and communities in a much more creative and just manner. At present the legal rights of parishes inhibit the witness of the church.