Sermons And Gubbins

This sermon was first preached at our Sunday morning service on 23rd September 2018. The Gospel that morning was Mark 9:30-37 , and the Old Testament reading was from Proverbs - 31:10-31 . So… I thought this morning, I’d look at our reading from Proverbs , and preach about how to be a great wife. But, then I remembered that I quite like living in my house, and so I decided that it would probably be a good idea to pass on the exciting opportunity to preach on such a reading as that. I hope you’ll agree with me that that was a good decision. And even if you don’t, well… you’re not the one who has to live with the consequences. But actually, we all want to be great, don’t we? A great wife, a great husband, a great parent? A great friend, a great employee or employer? A great sportsperson, or cook, or artist or writer? We want to be great at what we do, and for people to acknowledge that. We don’t all want to be great at everything (well, some of us do), but… for what’s ...

This sermon was preached at our Evensong service on Sunday 16th September. The New Testament reading that day was  Matthew 7:1-14 . We’ve had some interesting juxtaposition in our readings tonight; our  Old Testament reading  which we heard first, covered how Moses set up Israel’s system of Judges, and, then we heard our  New Testament reading , which starts off with Jesus saying “Judge not, so that you may not be judged.” Now, I preached on Moses at Evensong  only the other week , so I don’t propose to preach a sermon on him again so soon. And it was only as recent as last Sunday morning that Rev’d Cath gave us an excellent sermon on judgement based on the readings for that day, so I also don’t propose to re-tread the ground that Cath has already trod – if you want to hear that sermon and you haven’t done so, do get hold of Cath and ask her to share it with you; it was very good! Instead, then, I’d like to continue the theme of prayer I took ...

This sermon was first preached at our Evensong service on Sunday 26th August. The Old Testament reading that night was  Exodus 4:27-5:1 . Both our readings tonight were quite short, weren't they? Recently I’ve been getting used to an Evensong reading that takes longer to read out than my sermon does, but that’s not the case tonight! (Don’t worry – that’s not a hint that my sermon tonight is going to go on for ever!). My guess is our readers this evening thanked their lucky stars when they saw how short tonight’s readings were, and also that there were no difficult names to pronounce (though, there’s always a confusion about the pronunciation of Aaron isn’t there? – “Air-run”? “Arrun”?... I think I prefer the longer 'A' myself.) Anyway. I wonder whether our readers were praying for easy readings tonight? If so, it seems that their prayers worked! So… tonight, I’d like to think about that first Old Testament reading a bit – the reading from Exodus about Moses. Incidentally, w...

This sermon was preached at our Sunday morning service on 12th August. The Gospel reading that morning was  John 6:35,41-51 . Sometimes in church, it’s like we’re experiencing a mass case of deja vu, isn’t it? Week after week, we see the same people, use the same liturgy and pray for the same things. I’m also pretty sure that the other month, we sang the same hymns two weeks in a row, too... that might  have been an actual case of deja vu for me, though... Today, though, I’d like to reassure you that if you felt we’d repeated our Gospel reading from last week, you’re not quite  experiencing deja vu. No; today’s reading is not the same as last week’s, but it is remarkably similar. And there’s a reason for that. For a number of weeks, now - since the end of July - we’ve been working our way through chapter 6 of John’s Gospel. And it really seems that John had a bee in his metaphorical bonnet about one topic in particular. About bread. And, if you read through ...

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...

This sermon was given at our Evensong service on Sunday 24th June 2018. There had been much in the news that week about the US's policy of child-detention camps. The Old Testament reading that evening was Jeremiah 10:1-16 . Our Old Testament reading tonight is taken from the Book of Jeremiah. I don’t often go into historical detail about our readings, but I think – tonight – a brief overview would be helpful. The Book of Jeremiah was written somewhere around 625-585 BC, so roughly about 2600 years ago. It was written mainly in Hebrew, and was written when the Jewish people in Judah were a subject state, being ruled over by the Egyptians, and then – after a war between Egypt and Babylon – by the Babylonians.  Judah rebelled several times against Babylonian rule, but was, each time, defeated, until finally, Babylon crushed Judah, destroying Jerusalem and its temple, and sent the Jewish people into their famous Babylonian exile. Given that background, our reading seems som...