I guess I don’t need to tell you how deeply disappointed I am that Susan Boyle wasn’t voted top winner of Britains Got Talent 2009 competition.   Makes me wonder if viewers just took for granted that she’d win without their votes because she is loved the world round.  At any rate, Ms. Boyle is the winner as far as the world is concerned.  Take heart, Susan Boyle! We’ll remember you until the end of time.  [I can't even remember the name of the dance group that won, officially.  Isn't that telling..?!]   For all of you who are visiting here for the first time, I’m presenting Ms. Boyle’s last performance on Britains Got Talent 2009, I Dreamed a Dream.   Her performance gave me goose bumps and I cried at the absolute beauty of her instrument – and – the humble nature of this amazing woman.  Thank you, Ms. Boyle for sharing your God-given instrument with the world.  We are richer for it……and God bless you with everything you need in this lifetime!

I’ve not lost the irony that her last performance, I Dreamed a Dream, would be so apropos with the competition’s final results.  When I listen to it now, with the knowledge she didn’t win top place in the competition, I don’t look at the contest result as the end of a dream, but as the beginning of fantastic opportunities in voice performances.   I’d love to hear her sing opera, too.  Good luck, Susan Boyle!  Your Dream has Just Begun!!!

God Bless Tom Wright for telling it like it is, namely, that the Church has been trivializing Easter and that “Christians must keep their nerve – the Resurrection isn’t a metaphor, it’s a physical fact.”  Amen, Brother!

Tom Wright’s article, The Church Must Stop Trivialising Easter, is one every Christian ought to read and that’s why I’m providing a link to it today.   Here’s just a few of Wright’s gems embedded in his article:

• Easter was the pilot project.  What God did for Jesus He intends to do for the whole creation. Christians are called to be new-creation people here and now.
• True meaning has remained hidden; the Church has trivialised it; the world has rubbished it. Church has turned Jesus’s Resurrection into a “happy ending” after the dark and messy story of Good Friday.
• “Resurrection” to first century Jews wasn’t about “going to heaven” rather the physically dead being physically alive again. Nobody back then expected just one person to be bodily raised from the dead in the middle of history.
• The Resurrection is not what social science calls “cognitive dissonance”. Resurrection is not about someone coming back into the present mode of life, rather, someone going on into a new sort of existence, bodily.
• Split between God and the “real” world produces a public life lurching between anarchy and tyranny; an aesthetic swinging dramatically between sentimentalism and brutalism.
• Politicians can not save the world.
• Death is final weapon of the tyrant, the anarchist; resurrection indicates this weapon doesn’t have “the last word”.
• Church must work with Easter energy of justice and beauty, facing down skeptics, speaking once more of Jesus in a way that will be heard.

The Right Rev Dr Tom Wright is Bishop of Durham