Thought for the Week

I once received an anonymous letter. After a cursory glance, it went into the bin, but the final sentence stuck in my mind.

‘You were an odd-ball at school,’ it said, ‘and you still are.’

Well that would kind of stick in your mind, wouldn’t it?

That’s why, at my funeral — which won’t be for some time yet, I hope — I want the coffin to be carried from the church to the tune of Still Crazy After All These Years.

I suppose you’d have to be a bit crazy to retire from one career then embark on another rather than taking life easy.

And for many people, getting involved in religion at all seems a pretty odd-ball thing to do.

Mark’s story about Jesus tells how those around him were saying he was ‘out of his mind’.

Even his own family seemed to think it. Why? Because he was healing anyone and everyone in need and casting out demons and doing all this even on the Sabbath.

He was, in other words, breaking the rules to make sure everyone could experience God’s grace.

Maybe it is just a wee bit crazy for Christians to think that, by their faith and witness, they can help to bring change to this world giving, as a beautiful hymn puts it, bread to the hungry, land to the dispossessed, rights for the weak, roofs over the heads of the homeless, renewal for oceans plundered and poisoned, peace to the killing fields and justice for all.

But wouldn’t it be great if we could say, ‘yes, it sounds crazy, but it has to start somewhere and it may as well be with me’? Reverend William Crossan, Lorne and

Lowland Church, Campbeltown.