Sermons And Gubbins

This sermon was written for our Zoom service on Sunday 5th July, the day after lockdown restrictions were eased in the UK, allowing visits to pubs, bars and restaurants for the first time in over three months. The Gospel was Matthew 11:16-19,25-30 . I’ve read and re-read today’s Gospel many times in the past few weeks. You have to when you’re called to preach on a passage, but, perhaps even more so than normal, this week, I’ve been stuck for what aspect of this passage on which to focus. I think it’s because it seems such a mish-mash. The more I read our Gospel today, the less I see how it all ties together. It reads more like a collection of sayings than a process of thought – and, even allowing for the fact that the gospel-writer may well have brought these separate sayings together to form one speech, it’s hard to see what point either Christ, or Matthew (as the writer) is trying to make, especially now 2000 years later. Let me start by paraphrasing the gospel: it star...

This sermon was given at our Evensong service on July 2nd 2017. The New Testament reading was Luke 17:20-37 . I had half a mind today to preach a sermon about Grenfell Tower tonight; a proper, Old Testament-style sermon, full of anger and judgement, proclaiming: “Woe unto you, you pen-pushers and bureaucrats, who value money and cost-efficiency more than life – or, at the least, the life of others . Woe unto you, you hypocrites, who would rather cover the poor with a flammable veneer than have to look at the cost that your comfortable lifestyle has upon those around you, let alone have to deal with the mess your money leaves in its wake. Woe unto you, you authorities and law-makers, who bow and fawn to the whim and every wish of big business, refusing to pass laws that would ensure landlords bear the smallestounce of responsibility in ensuring their tenants live in buildings fit for human habitation . And woe to you, you landlords, who exploit the vulnerable and...

This sermon was preached at the Sunday morning service on 12th February 2017. The Gospel that morning was Matthew 5:21-27 . So… who’s up for a good, old-fashioned sermon on the evils of adultery and divorce this morning? Jesse Custer, from the Vertigo comic series, Preacher  No? Me neither, to be honest. But… the reading from Matthew’s Gospel is what is allocated for us today as part of our Church’s lectionary, so we’d best get cracking, I suppose! <cough> <nervous silence> I joke, of course. But… today’s Gospel reading is not an easy one, especially not for those of us who like to inhabit the space on the liberal end of the theological spectrum. I like my Jesus to be a religious rule-breaker, non-judgemental and concerned about social justice. I like him to be the man we see in Mark chapter 2 , who rebukes the Pharisees when they complain about his work in breaking heads of corn to eat on the Sabbath day; the man who we see in Joh...

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...