Sermons And Gubbins

  This sermon was given at our Holy Communion services on Sunday 13th September. The Gospel that morning was Matthew 18:21-35 . St Peter gets a bad rap, doesn't he? He always seems to get the wrong end of the stick in his interactions with Christ. Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see he often just doesn't understand what seems obvious to us, or he drops clanger after clanger. Nowhere is this more obvious than at Easter when he cries out his unwavering commitment to never betray his friend and saviour, only to do exactly that three times after Christ's arrest.  It's even more ironic, then, that we find it is Peter who is questioning the limits of forgiveness in our Gospel this morning. I wonder if he looked back upon this conversation on forgiveness when he heard that cockerel crowing that day?  I think sometimes though that hindsight can be unhelpful. Sure, it can help us see the irony in a situation such as this, but also, I think it can cloud ...

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 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...

It is, admittedly, with some trepidation that I have come to lead us all in Evensong this evening. After the horrific events earlier this week at the 16th century St Etienne’s church in Normandy, there is, unfortunately, a small amount of fear in coming to church, to worship God together, at all. I suspect mine was not the only mind whose thought this crossed tonight. For, as I’m sure we’re are aware, on Tuesday morning, whilst saying mass with a small, faithful congregation in an ancient church, Father Jacques Hamel was murdered, martyred at the altar, by two young men, eager to perpetuate and escalate a religious war. I am very glad to see that you are here with me this evening. I am glad to see that you have, consciously or not, made a decision to not let the main weapon of terrorism – that of fear – win over your desire to congregate and to worship God together. I’d like, this evening, for us to think about Father Jacques, and the reaction of the world to the events...