Sermons And Gubbins

Is it too late to wish you a happy new year?    I’m sure there must be some convention here to follow; a piece of good etiquette that says something along the lines of “new year’s wishes may be conferred upon others up until midday on the Feast of Epiphany, unless there was resting snow on New Year’s Day, in which case – in exceptional circumstances – you may continue to wish someone a happy new year until the first bells of Evensong on the following Sunday”. If that etiquette exists, I must confess my ignorance as to not knowing it, and so I’d like to take this opportunity this morning to wish you a happy new year. May it be kind to you. I think we could do with a kind year, don’t you? The past two years have been hard and cruel. They’ve changed us. None of us are the same people we were this time in 2019; our lives have become smaller and more insular. We’ve lost colleagues, friends and loved ones. Covid has changed our plans and rewritten our rules and – even if we have man...

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...

This sermon was preached on Remembrance Day 2014, 100 years after the start of WWI. It was a family service. Many of the children had been given a large cardboard poppy with the name of one of the men from the parish who died in WWI or WWII. I've always found Remembrance Sunday a difficult service - I guess it's supposed to be. I was struck that year of the rhetoric being used by people such as Michael Gove to seemingly glorify WWI , alongside a surge of posts on social media from groups such as Britain First and other far right organisations laying claim to the war-dead in order to pursue their own morally repugnant agenda. I found that very worrying, given the significance of the year. The readings were Isai ah 2:1-4 and John 15:9-17 . How old will you be in four years? Where do you think you’ll be?  Does that seem a long way away for you? Maybe you’ll be in a new school? Or a new job? Perhaps there’ll be all sorts of new people in your life you don’t yet k...

I preached the following sermon at Evensong this evening. I found it a difficult sermon to write, and a large part of me wanted to write something very different. I tried hard to be non-partisan. Whilst writing it, I found myself hoping I would have written the same sermon had the election outcome been different. I certainly learnt a lot whilst writing it; I hope you find it helpful to read. ----- How could I preach this evening without talking about the general election? And how can a preacher do that in a meaningful way without causing offence to some, or even all!? For, if God has any meaning in our daily lives, He must surely be a factor in us forming our political views. And as Christ himself will never be our prime minister, the conclusions we individually reach in determining how to vote as Christians will be as diverse as we ourselves are. No party, be they comprised of God's people or otherwise, is God's party. In our earthly battles, God, as Joshua l...