Sermons And Gubbins

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 ...