Sermons And Gubbins

This sermon was given at our Remembrance Sunday service on Sunday 10th November 2019. The first Remembrance Day took place one hundred years ago, almost to the day. Back then, Remembrance Sunday wasn’t a thing. People commemorated the end of the “Great” War – the “war to end all wars” – on the anniversary of Armistice Day itself. It was only after the Second World War that services such as this, on the closest Sunday to the 11th November became common place, overtaking, if not replacing, the observance of a minute’s silence on the actual anniversary of the end of that first world war. But, before that, between the two world wars, the vast majority of the population of the UK marked an act of remembrance specifically on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month every year. That tradition has been revived within the last 40 years or so, and now, many workplaces across the country will also hold a minute’s silence tomorrow morning too. A colourised photo of...

There’s a phrase – five small words – that people utter when they’re trying to empathise with you. People say it with the best of intentions, trying to bridge a gap of grief or loss, attempting to reach out and find some common ground. It’s a phrase that tries to be kind; that tries to be helpful. … I think it’s the most annoying phrase in the English language: “ I know how you fee l”. I’m sure I’ve uttered it before, and I’m thankful I wasn’t met with a swift slap in the face, to be honest. It’s certainly what I’ve felt like doing when people have said it to me. Because, the thing is, standing here in this pulpit tonight, I don’t know how you feel. I’ve not lost a partner or a mother or a father, or a daughter or a son. I’ve not lost a brother or a sister. I have lost other relatives, and my life is unequivocally emptier without good friends I have known who have died in years gone by. I also carry with me the grief of nearly ten years of my wife and I being unable to ...

This story was given in place of a sermon at our 10:15 service on Sunday 22nd September. The gospel that day was Luke 16:1-13 , a particularly tricky parable of Christ's in which he commends a cheating manager for looking out for his own future. Lots of very learned people have written lots of clever stuff about the passage, and the one thing that people agree on is that it is just very hard to understand! In the past few weeks, I've read lots about it, and tied my thoughts up in knots! One piece I read compared the parable to a particular trope in Roman comedy, in which a cunning servant tricks his master, and everything works out fine in the end (think Frankie Howerd in ' Up Pompeii ').  There does seem to be a similarity, and that got me wondering whether the parable might actually have been based on a play that Christ saw. I then (in turn) reimagined that as a real-life situation that Christ happened to come across, and... well, the result is below. I hope that f...

This sermon was preached at our Sunday morning service on August 25th. It was my first Sunday back after my paternity leave. The sermon borrows heavily from one I gave in Oldham three years earlier , but I think that's ok! The gospel this morning was Luke 13:10-17 . Hope you enjoy... It’s lovely to be back up here in the pulpit this morning. It’s been quite a long time since I last preached, and I’m really thankful that Huw, Alex, Cath, Fi and Vaughan have picked up the extra services and sermons whilst I’ve been off on paternity leave. Thank you all! The ministry team here are fortunate to have the freedom of being in a large team that allows one of us time off when needed. Even with that, however, the time has still gone pretty quickly, though! My last sermon before Miriam was born was right at the beginning of June, and I wasn’t on the rota to do anything then until after she was born. She was 6-weeks-old on Friday, and this is my first time back in the pulpit sinc...

This sermon was first given on Sunday 2nd June, a week after the EU election results were announced. The Gospel that morning was John 17:20-26 . I’ve had a song stuck in my head most of this week. Does that ever happen to you? You’re just sitting there, minding your own business, and a few small seconds of a song pop into your head and keep going on a loop. It’s never enough of the song to actually entertain you, only enough to just make you think you might be starting to go mad, and that you might never think of anything else ever again. It’s called an earworm, which is a weird image when you think about it! They say that one way you can get rid of an earworm is to share the song with others… so, thank you all for the help you’re about to give me this morning! The song is by one of the most famous bands in the world, U2. I suspect you know it; it’s called ‘One’.   The first lines say this: Is it getting better, or do you feel the same? Will it...

This poem was written for our Sunday morning service on Sunday 28th April, the second Sunday of Easter. The gospel reading was John 20:19-31 . In the news that week had been the horiffic bombings in Sri Lanka and the murder of Irish journalist, Lyra McKee . The poem was inspired by the idea of resurrection being a process as espoused in this sermon by Michael K. Marsh, especially this quote:   " The facts are just the starting point for the story. The fact of the empty tomb is the starting point for the resurrection story. Whatever facts you woke up to on Easter Monday are simply the starting point for your story of resurrection. Too often, however, we take the facts as the entire story. Isn’t that what we’ve done with St. Thomas?"  I think we certainly do think of Thomas like that - he is the perennial doubter, rather than the saint who brought Christ's message to India, and had grown so much in faith that he was prepared to die for his God. It made me wonder wh...