Bishop Richard’s Weekly video Message – Transcript 03.09.2026

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Bishop's Weekly Video Message #302 – 03.09.2026

Video for September 3rd, 2026

Hello everyone and welcome back to this week’s video.  I hope you’ve had a good summer.

I like to record a few videos while I’m on holiday, and this was meant to have been a clever one. I’m in the Picos de Europa in northern Spain and yesterday was the solar eclipse with two minutes of totality. I had rather hoped for a spectacular display.  After a very steep hike to the top of the mountain, sadly the cloud descended.  I had planned to insert an impressive clip.  Unfortunately, our experience of the eclipse looked like this! (insert video here)

Today we understand eclipses as a matter of simple physics. The moon passes in front of the sun, and we get a few minutes of unnatural darkness, and it goes spookily quiet. The animals are confused. We did get the darkness I suppose, albeit of a rather misty variety. If you were a neanderthal cave man it would have been terrifying, likely to be interpreted as a portent of doom. It remained so right up to the age of science.

However, there is a certain wonder about it.  When the writer of Psalm 19 said, “the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament show forth his handiwork”, he wasn’t wrong. Even though our scientific understanding has taken some of the magical element out of the appreciation of the created order, nonetheless it retains a capacity to produce awe and wonder, as it did on the coast of Spain, rather than up in the mountains. Very few people would look up on a starry night in the mountains like this and say, “aren’t I something”!  Wonder such as this is a foretaste of worship. The capacity to appreciate beauty seems to be hard wired into our psyche. One of the ways the scriptures understand sin is as misplaced worship. Our English word worship is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word to ascribe worth to something. True worship is ascribing the highest worth to God. The scriptures call ascribing ultimate worth to lesser things as idolatry.

In the Old Testament the Prophet Elijah is called to speak into the culture of Israel at its lowest moral ebb. King Ahab and Queen Jezebel hadn’t completely extinguished true worship, but they had encouraged equivocation. Surely, they said, “putting all your eggs in one religious basket is unwise”. Why not placate Yahweh and all the other local deities as well?  Such equivocation in our culture might be interpreted as an admirable avoidance of arrogance. In Israelite society the results of such equivocation were obvious: moral decline, corruption and rampant injustice. What you worshipped clearly did influence how you behaved.  Elijah will have none of it. He invites the prophets of Baal the local Canaanite deity to a contest.  He challenges the gathered crowd to make their mind up. “Why do you limp between two opinions?” If God is God follow him; if Baal is God follow him.  You can read the full story in 1 Kings 18. The result is a spectacular demonstration of God’s power and a widespread return to true worship.

Every revival of the church’s fortunes against the stream of culture has been preceded by a determined purification and re-commitment. We tend to dismiss idolatry as of no relevance because we don’t dance around little bronze statues. But idolatry is simply placing things, sometimes really good things, in ultimate places in our affections and devotion that should be reserved for God.  We can idolise football teams, the status afforded by possessions, the status of position; the approval of others; the acquisition of wealth; personal beauty and appearance; security and control, feeling good, a peaceful life; even relationships with those we love; and perish the thought even experiencing solar eclipses. The danger of modern idolatries is that they go unrecognised because they are so socially acceptable.

As we roll out some of the plans we pray will foster sustainability in our diocese.  I hope church sustainability – important though it is, won’t become an idol.  John Piper said, “The greatest adversary of love for God is not his enemies but his gifts.  And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth.  For when we replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognisable, and almost incurable”.

This eclipse was a wonder, but a far greater wonder is God himself, revealed in Jesus Christ and dwelling in our hearts in the resurrection power of the Holy Spirit. A wholehearted devotion to bringing him glory by bringing our lives into alignment with his word might have more effect on the fortunes of our church than any strategy, vital though it is, ever could.