Sermons And Gubbins

There are so many carols I look forward to singing as we approach Christmas. In Advent, I love O Come, O Come Emmanuel , with its sense of longing and expectation, and during the Christmas period itself, I adore the poetry of It Came Upon the Midnight Clear , and the combination of music and lyrics of O Holy Night never fails to lift my mind toward heaven and the wonder of the incarnation. There’s one carol, though, that, if I never sung nor heard again, I would, much like its protagonist, not be shedding any tears. I hate, with a passion unbecoming to this season of goodwill, Away in a Manger . There. I’ve said it. I’m sorry if it’s your favourite carol. If it is, you might want to stop reading here so I don’t spoil it for you permanently. Close the internet window and write me off as a grumpy little man… A nativity scene, to give you a pause so you can close the page without reading the rest of the blog. Still with me? Great! Let me elaborate then! I do actually hav...

This sermon was preached on the morning of Sunday 13th December 2015; Advent 3, or Gaudete Sunday. The readings for the day were Zephaniah 3:14-20 , Isaiah 12:2-6 , Philippians 4:4-7 and Luke 3:7-18 . Christmas; it starts earlier every year, doesn’t it? Or at least it seems to. All of the big department stores have been playing ‘I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day’, ‘Santa Baby’ and - let's face it - a handful of other Christmas songs on a loop since November, and the local Co-op has been selling Advent calendars and selection boxes since before they removed the Halloween sweets and masks from the shelves. It’s not just the shops though; I am friends with a colleague on Facebook who posted a photo of his neighbour’s house, all decked out in Christmas lights. No harm in that, now is there? Except he took the photo and posted it to Facebook on September 12th. There’s a part of me that wonders whether his neighbours did it purely to annoy him…! It’s still Advent, and ...

This sermon was preached on the morning on November 15th 2015, a few days after the terrible attacks in Paris on the night of November 13th. The sermon was written before those attacks, but required some last minute tweaks to take them, and their effect upon us, into account. In researching and writing it, I am indebted to another sermon I found online preached by the Rev'd Dr Willimon in 2012 - A World Rocked by God . If you have the time, I highly recommend reading it. Part of me toyed (for a moment only, mind) with reading out his sermon instead of writing my own. I'm sure you'll see the sermon below owes much to it. The readings were Daniel 12:1-3 , Hebrews 10:11-25 & Mark 13:1-8 . Before I start my sermon, I’d like to invite you to take some time to look around you. Notice the walls, the ceiling, the beautiful stained glass, the intricate tiling on the floor, the pew on which you are sitting. All this? With all the years it has been here, and...

This sermon was preached on Remembrance Day 2014, 100 years after the start of WWI. It was a family service. Many of the children had been given a large cardboard poppy with the name of one of the men from the parish who died in WWI or WWII. I've always found Remembrance Sunday a difficult service - I guess it's supposed to be. I was struck that year of the rhetoric being used by people such as Michael Gove to seemingly glorify WWI , alongside a surge of posts on social media from groups such as Britain First and other far right organisations laying claim to the war-dead in order to pursue their own morally repugnant agenda. I found that very worrying, given the significance of the year. The readings were Isai ah 2:1-4 and John 15:9-17 . How old will you be in four years? Where do you think you’ll be?  Does that seem a long way away for you? Maybe you’ll be in a new school? Or a new job? Perhaps there’ll be all sorts of new people in your life you don’t yet k...

This sermon was preached on Sunday 4th October. It was a very difficult sermon to write. I knew, from the readings, that it must be about marriage, and I certainly did not want to be disengenuous in my preaching. It's the sermon I've done that's generated the most conversation at the door afterwards, as well as, I'm very pleased to say, generated the most compliments. There was, of course, some disagreement, and sadly, one lady seemed particularly put out, but at least stayed until the end of the service to tell me so. The readings were   Genesis 2:18-24 , Psalm 8 , Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12 and Mark 10:2-16 . A few weeks ago, Vaughan challenged me to refer to God as Mother during a future sermon, for God, as we know, is above, and beyond, and before gender. In this sermon, then, for reasons I hope will become clear, I refer to God the Father, as our Mother, using the feminine form. One of the great things about the Church of England is its lectionary. The rea...

This sermon was preached at Evensong on 27/09/15 where we celebrated Michaelmas - the feast of St Michael, to whom our church is dedicated. The readings were Daniel 10:4-end and Revelation 5 . Names have always been seen as important things. I’m sure you know the story of Rumpelstiltskin – whose name likely literally means ‘Noisy, Limping Imp’, who struck a ghoulish bargain with the fairy-tale queen that he would take her first-born son unless she could tell him his name. In our Christian and Jewish tradition, we hold much reverence over the name of God in particular – in Judaism, the name of God cannot be spoken or written, instead, the tetragrammaton   – the four letters ‘YHWH’ – are used whenever the name of God needs to be invoked. Through the years, we have added vowels, to make the name ‘Yahweh’, or even ‘Jehovah’. In our bibles, the four letters will often be replaced by the way we now commonly refer to God – The LORD (often written in capital letters). God’s name is too...

This was an interesting sermon to write. It is based on the Beatitudes, found in  Matthew 5:1-11 .   I knew I needed it to be about how Christ's Beatitudes speech was to do with flipping the established norms, and I even needed to attempt to get across the offensiveness of what Christ said ('Blessed are those who mourn'?!). 'Blessed' has become a religious word, but this is not how it was used originally; it was used of the wealthy and powerful - it carries connotations of luck, and happiness, and wealth. It is striking, then, that Christ's 'blessed' people are those who would never be considered as such. I spent some time re-investigating some of the characters involved in the speech. Three of the more interesting subjects were the 'poor in spirit', the 'meek' and those who hunger after 'righteousness'. Much that I found mentioned how the 'poor in spirit' were those who recognised their spiritual bankruptcy before God...

I preached this sermon a year ago. It was interesting reading it back last night before church this morning. It's made me wonder how I'd have preached on the passage differently today. The gospel was Luke 9:28-36 . Raphael's Christ: invented the hover-jet. THIN PLACES A few weeks ago, Jenny and I went up to Scotland for our nephew’s christening. We decided to break our journey on the way up, and so we stopped off and stayed in Northumberland, where we took a trip to Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island. The Irish missionary, St Aidan, set up a monastery there in the 7th Century, and from there, his band of merry monks set about restoring Christianity to an England that had fallen into Anglo-Saxon paganism. Our trip to that island got me thinking about a concept in Celtic spirituality called ‘thin places’. A ‘thin place’ is somewhere where people feel particularly close to God. In poetic language, it’s where the fabric between heaven and earth is stre...