Sermons And Gubbins

This meditation was written for our Good Friday Last Hour at the Cross service - Friday 30th March 2018. The service included five music tracks that fit the theme of Good Friday, focussing on death, and the cross. You can find a list of them at the bottom of the meditation. So, this is it. The Last Hour. I remember when I was small, an hour would last a lifetime;  boring car-journeys that went on for miles bending the laws of time and space;  dull maths lessons that stretched out over eons, as far into the future as I could imagine.  Now? Now, those sixty minutes can pass by in the blinking of an eye.  I can sit down for ten seconds only to find an afternoon has been spent. I look at your cross. I wonder how long that Last Hour lasted for you.  Did it feel like eternity to you? Was it eternity to you?  Is it eternal? To you, outside of time, it must surely have been both –  the blinking of an eye, and the life...

This sermon was given at our evensong service on Sunday 18th March. The New Testament reading was  Romans 5:12-21   During the week leading up to the service, both  Ken Dodd  and  Stephen Hawking  passed away. Whenever I prepare to preach a sermon, I look at the readings, and first of all try to find something that strikes me as odd or unusual to preach on. Sometimes, I’ll find that when I’m looking at the readings, that there’s one which is hard to understand, or I need to read several times and do quite a bit of research on to really get what is being said. When that happens, I know that that is what I should be preaching on – if I find it hard to understand, then others might too, and spending my sermon unpacking that difficult reading could be really helpful to at least some of the people who are listening (I hope!). And so, you can imagine how thrilled I was – the sheer joy of the inner voice in my head when I saw that today’s New Testament readi...