Sermons And Gubbins

This sermon was preached at the Sunday morning service on 12th February 2017. The Gospel that morning was Matthew 5:21-27 . So… who’s up for a good, old-fashioned sermon on the evils of adultery and divorce this morning? Jesse Custer, from the Vertigo comic series, Preacher  No? Me neither, to be honest. But… the reading from Matthew’s Gospel is what is allocated for us today as part of our Church’s lectionary, so we’d best get cracking, I suppose! <cough> <nervous silence> I joke, of course. But… today’s Gospel reading is not an easy one, especially not for those of us who like to inhabit the space on the liberal end of the theological spectrum. I like my Jesus to be a religious rule-breaker, non-judgemental and concerned about social justice. I like him to be the man we see in Mark chapter 2 , who rebukes the Pharisees when they complain about his work in breaking heads of corn to eat on the Sabbath day; the man who we see in Joh...

This sermon was preached at evensong on 5th February 2017. The Old Testament reading was Amos 2:4-end . I am somewhat tempted, this evening, to not give a sermon. I don’t know if you’re inwardly rejoicing at that, or not. Instead of me preaching, we could take 5 minutes of silence, to think, or to pray, or to maybe have a small nap?  My reasoning for this temptation is not – surprisingly enough – down to the fact that I haven’t come up with anything to say (though I did find this evening’s readings difficult to think about what to talk about), but actually because we’ve already had one sermon already. Or at least, we’ve already had the end of one sermon already. Did you hear it? Don’t worry, you didn’t blink and miss an itinerant priest bound up to the pulpit and deliver a pithy and precise homily. No – it was, as you’ve probably guessed, one of our set readings for the evening – our piece from the book of Amos. You wouldn’t know it from tonight’s reading – it wa...