Sermons And Gubbins

This sermon was preached at our Sunday morning service on 3rd March 2019, shortly before the start of Lent. The Gospel that morning was Luke 9:28-36 , and the Old Testament reading was Exodus 34:29-35 .   I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the Comic Relief Kilimanjaro climb on the BBC over the past week? Nine celebrities, including BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker, Strictly Come Dancing judge, Shirley Ballas and Pointless quiz-host Alexander Armstrong have been recreating the original Comic Relief celebrity mountain climb from 10 years ago. To all accounts, it’s been a gruelling journey up Africa’s highest mountain. There’ll be a documentary on TV on 13 th March which should make for interesting viewing! Mount Kilimanjiro I must be honest, though, there’s not many of these celebrity endurance charity tasks that gain my attention. I’m aware David Walliams did some swimming a few years ago, and there was, of course, Eddie Izzard’s marathon of marathons for S...

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...