A couple of things this weekend/week give me pause for thought.

Yesterday, unsurprisingly enough, despite what one American group predicted, wasn't the day of rapture.  This means that the world almost certainly won't end at the end of this year.  It's too easy either to make fun of Harold Camping and his followers or to criticise their selective and misguided reading of scripture.  Something about motes and logs comes to mind.  People gave their money, their time, their energy to this, and must now be feeling very bemused and bewildered.  Rather than our ridicule or scorn they deserve our compassion.

This week the Church of Scotland holds its Assembly which will include the end of a moratorium on discussing the ordination of openly and actively gay ministers.  It doesn't matter where on the spectrum one sits on this matter, the truth is that the C of S is caught bewteen a rock and a hard place with people threatening schism if they don't get their own way.  Not everyone can get their desired outcome, so some creative thinking is needed to avoid a further split in the Body of Christ.  A lot of the attention is centred on one C of S minister, Scott Rennie, whose appointment in 2009 caused great controversy at their Assembly that year.  People who express extreme views - either way - seem oblivious to the fact that this man, his partner, his former wife or his daughter are real people with real feelings, capable of being hurt, not just pawns in someone's theological argument.  Wherever we stand on the human sexuality issue, we do well to pray for Scott and those whose lives intertwine with his, in what must be a traumatic week, and for the C of S as it seeks to discern God's way, not it's own, in moving forward.  Again, words come to mind: judge not, lest you be judged.

If, as the New Testament epistles tell us, the Church (that is, the global community of believers in Jesus) is the Body of Christ, then the fact that these parts are wounded should cause us to remember that if one part suffers the whole suffers.  Someone may respond that elsewhere we are told to amputate the part of the body that causes us to sin, but I would counter that with the words that only the sinless one has permission to cast the first stone, and seems to choose otherwise.

Whatever we may think about either of these topics, we do well to recall our own shortcomings of discipleship and to try to live more humbly, hospitably and peaceably within this battered body of which we are part.