Today I received by email a whole set of 'reflection papers' I have to read before my university summer school.  They are fascinating!  At a totally surface level, it is interesting to compare the layout, length and who has actually answered the questions set (and who has yet to submit).  They range from brief (less than a side) to verbose (six pages, mine).  They also vary in terms of subject matter and degree of, hmm, what's the word, openness? vulnerability? Possibly even the depth, as in profundity, which varies (though I hesitate to critique other people's work in what, for some, is a new venture - not everyone has spent the last umpteen years having to do it).  I am intrigued that one person has chosen to reflect on an incident that occurred about 30 years ago whilst everyone else has selected a recent event.  Most are quite specific, but a couple were very general.  Topics explored all related to balancing pastoral and profressional priorities, and ranged from the wearing of dog collars to funerals, from admission to communion to outsourcing domestic services in a residential college!  It will be intriguing to see how we work with the material and what new insights emerge.

I was woken up at 6 a.m. by the radio telling me good news that Alan Johnstone had been released.  This release was, it seems, secured without violence, and is undoubtedly immensely positive.  I am grateful for those in my congregation who have steadfastly written his name in our prayer book over the last couple of months, continuing to pray for him when his name vanished from the news.

At the same time, we continue to pray for the family of Madeleine McCann, and all the other unnamed, unknown men, women and children who are kidnapped, abducted or trafficked every single day.  Somehow we need to 'be' as well as 'hear' good news.

Yesterday I read an essay entitled "Baptists: the Fount of all Heresy" which made me smile, and which probably explains a few things.  I also came across mention of an obscure, and new to me, sect called the Muggletonians, which sounds like something out of J K Rowling's writing.  I am somewhat intrigued by the vast number of whacky-sounding sects that emerged during the 16th/17th centuries, including one which was attributed to one of my own, nominal, forebears - the Gortonites were a weird lot (nuff said, you all cry) whose founder was expelled from Britain.  Not sure that any of this gets me anywhere, but it is fun to discover just how weird England might have been in those days.

Today I am writng my sermon on Matthew's Portrait of Jesus picking up something of the motif of Jesus as the new Moses, of fulfilment and its link with righteousness, notably as expressed when Jesus tells John to baptise him to 'fulfil all righteousness.'  My nice big fat two-volume commentary on Matthew suggests that this is a tricky phrase to explain, but that Jesus' baptism is a sign of identification with ordinary people, and perhaps especially the sinners, tax-collectors and prostitutes that are mentioned in Matt 21:32.

So far, so good, but what then of the Great Commission with its command to baptise others, a topic that has not appeared anywhere else in Matthew.  Setting aside its liturgical, proto- (?) trinitarian formula, or suggestions that it is a later addition and may or may not be what Jesus actually said, what does it then mean for the new disciple to be baptised?  To identify with Jesus, as we so often assert?  OK, but if so, does that mean to identify with what Jesus saw himself identifying with?  In other words, does our baptism 'function' in some way in us identfiying ourselves with the 'sinners' of our own day rather than as somehow morally superior and hence (horrid theological phrase coming up) over against them?  With my non-sacramental view of baptism, I think I can read it as a conscious decision to identify with Jesus and hence, in imitation of him, with other people, and that has huge implications for mission.

This is probably a highly dodgey reading of the text, but what do any clever people out there think?

This morning I heard Kate Adie in the radio, doing a newspaper review and commenting on the current situation regarding terrorism in the UK.  She spoke a lot of sense, words that resonated with my own feelings.

Firstly, she observed that most people of all races, religions, nationalities and occupations are decent.  Extreme ideology is not restricted to any one demographic sub-group, and suspicion of middle eastern doctors in general is unfounded.

Secondly she spoke about the shortness of memory that colours British society, recalling how in the 1970's she - along with other journalists - was on 'bomb watch' in London.  Certainly I recall two bomb scares leading to evacuation when I was in the first year of secondary school (in Northampton, 1974), numerous bomb scares and bombs when I was a student in London, not least when foreign nationals used to kills each other with car bombs in the west end, or when an explosive device was found outside McDonalds in Oxford Street.  Tube station closures due to bomb scares were common place and you just got on with it.  Anyone remember the Harrod's bomb in 1983?  In 1993 there was the Warrington bomb, did we go into panic mode?  No, we got on with life.  Further, the father of one of the victims got involved in the peace process, turning tragedy into opportunity; this does not diminish the tragedy or injustice of a life cut short, it just speaks of a different response to it.

I feel for the people in Paisley - I have driven through it countless times going from Glasgow airport to East Kilbride on business trips - and I do have an idea of what it is like to have terror on your doorstep, but, as a nation, let's not get paranoid or forget that, as Kate Adie observes, most people are decent, law-abiding citizens who just want to get on with life.