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Showing posts from August, 2015

The Happy and Wealthy and Fortunate

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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...

Transfiguration of Christ

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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...

The Immigrants and the Bread

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This sermon was preached on Sunday 2nd August. The Old Testament reading was  Exodus 16:2-15 Our prime minister, David Cameron, caused something of a stir this week, when he referred to the number of migrants attempting to make the journey from Calais to the UK as a ‘swarm’. This use of language, comparing this group of people to insects – whether meant that way or not – was de-humanising and antagonistic. It was also sad. Perhaps, in his role as prime minister of the UK, he can little afford to show empathy here – his focus in his job, after all, is the country he governs. The same is not true for the rest of us, however. We are called to be empathetic, to put ourselves in the place of the outsider. As Christians especially, we are called to remember that we ourselves are migrants. The New Testament reminds us several times that we are in the world, but not of the world (John 15:18-19, John 17:16) – that we are strangers and exiles upon earth (Hebrews 11:...