Sermons And Gubbins

This sermon was given at our Sunday morning service on 29th June - St Peter & St Paul's Day. The Gospel was Matthew 16:13-19 . I hope you enjoy reading it.   In our gospel today, Jesus asks his disciples a question. Well, he asks them two questions actually, but I’ll stick to the first one for now. Jesus takes his disciples out of of their Jewish homeland, and into  Caesarea Philippi  – a place named after the Roman governor of the area, where the Greek god Pan was worshipped prominently, and there was a temple dedicated to Caesar himself, and Jesus asks his disciples what people are saying about him. “Who do they say I am?”, he asks, surrounded by all the trappings of empire, and pagan gods. Who does the world, scrabbling to hold onto the power it has, fighting political and religious wars, say Jesus is?     Today, the Church celebrates the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. We call today Petertide.  Two little dickie birds, sitting on a wall....

This sermon was preached at our Sunday morning Eucharist on Sunday 8th August 2021, following a few weeks of relaxation of the UK's covid restrictions. The Gospel was John 6:35,41-51 . Hope you enjoy reading it! Raising children can be repetitive sometimes. Mealtimes especially. Don’t get me wrong, my two are very, very good, but we still have those conversations every parent has: “Come on now, eat up!” “Don’t liiike it!” “You do! This is your favourite!” “Want ice-cream.” “After. Eat up your meat and potatoes first. And you, eat up your bread.” I swear I have these conversations in my sleep sometimes; “Eat up! Eat your bread!”   Eating bread There is – surprisingly – a link here to today’s Gospel. When I read it out earlier, did it feel oddly familiar? A bit repetitive? If you were here last Sunday, or even the Sunday before, you’d be forgiven for thinking that maybe I’d read out last week’s Gospel instead, or maybe that of the week before? “Hear the Gospel of o...

This talk was first given at our 10:15 service on Sunday 30th December. Our Sunday School was still on leave for Christmas, so I tried to ensure the children were catered for in my talk today! The Gospel was  Luke 2:41-52 , where Jesus stays behind in the temple without his parents. Right! Well, that’s it! Christmas is all done for another year, and now we’ve got some tidying up to do! We need to prepare to go ahead into 2019, and get ready for everything the new year will bring! We’ve got some stuff to do in the church here for that… would anyone like to help me? <children come up> Excellent. Ok. Up here, we’ve got our travelling nativity. Maybe it came to some of your houses over Christmas? Well, now Christmas is done, we need to get it all ready for the new year. Some of the figures probably need a bit of a wash, and maybe a bit of a patch-up here and there. And we need to get a new sign-up sheet sorted don’t we, so we know where it needs to go next year? Ok – you take Mar...

This story was written as a response to the Gospel reading on the morning of Sunday 29th July and read out as my sermon on that day. There are probably opportunities to make it interactive, using actual gingerbread man biscuits that can be broken and given to the congregation/children, or perhaps using paperchain people that can be expanded at appropriate points in the story (and then stretched out across the church afterwards). I didn't do that (this time), but if you'd like to nick the idea should you ever want to use the story, please feel free (and let me know how it goes!) The reading was the famous passage from  John 6:1-21  about the feeding of the 5000 with five loaves and two fish. I read a sermon which encouraged us to think of ourselves not as the crowd, or the disciples, or eve n the boy in the story, but the bread. (It's very good... Go read it  here ). This story is my attempt to help people do that, to think of ourselves as bread; gingerbread. Hope you enjo...