Sermons And Gubbins

This story was written for our Sunday morning service on 21st September, St Matthew's day. The gospel was Matthew 9:9-13 (I would post a Bible Gateway link, but it seems that site has become an unintended victim of the UK's Online Safety Act). I hope you enjoy reading the story! St Matthew from Rembrandt's St Matthew and the Angel  We never liked him. Sitting there, in his little tax booth all day. Watching the rest of us work, while he simply wrote in his ledger. “That’s a fine catch!”, he would call out, as we struggled to get the nets out of the boat. And then, as we got to the hard and dirty work of gutting and cleaning the fish, he’d saunter along, his coin purse jangling at his side. We’d try to tell him many times, how can we pay tax on earnings we’ve not yet made? But his answer was always the same. “The fish you have already caught belong to Caesar, so you need to pay your share now”. Funnily enough, he never wanted fish themselves as payment. We might have underst...

This is a (slightly) updated version of my story from 2015 and was given for my sermon on Sunday 30th June 2024. The gospel was Mark 5:21-43 . I hope you enjoy reading it!      She’d heard he was going to be there. The talk on the street was of nothing else. The man who worked miracles, who cast out demons, who cured the sick, was in town. She knew she had to be there too. Perhaps, just perhaps , he’d take pity on her? Perhaps this was her chance?  That’s why she was there that day. That’s why she was being jostled back-and-forth in that crowd – every one of them hoping to catch a glimpse of the teacher. For her, though, a glimpse was not enough.       She wasn’t just ill. As awful as the constant bleeding made her feel, that wasn’t the worst of it. She was ‘unclean’. Physically and spiritually . She hadn’t been allowed in the synagogue for twelve years – hadn’t been allowed to worship God for twelve years. She shouldn’t even be out in public, ...

This story was written in lieu of a sermon for our Zoom service on Sunday 26th April; the second Sunday after Easter. The gospel story was Luke 24:13-35 - The Road to Emmaus . In the story, only one of the disciples is named - Cleopas. In this reimagining of the tale, I have assumed the other to be his wife - the same woman mentioned who was present at Christ's crucifixion in John's gospel . I have tried to find parrallels between that initial time after Jesus' death, and the situation in which we all find ourselves today. I hope you enjoy reading it. A statue of St Mary Cleophas I t was a much nicer day than it should have been. You’d have thought given everything that had happened, the sky would be dark and the rain would be lashing down – you know, the kind of rain that stings you as you try to rush your way through it, trying your vainest best to make your way home before you are almost literally soaked to the bone, and your skin is red and cold from the ...

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 story was written as a response to the Gospel reading on the morning of Sunday 29th July and read out as my sermon on that day. There are probably opportunities to make it interactive, using actual gingerbread man biscuits that can be broken and given to the congregation/children, or perhaps using paperchain people that can be expanded at appropriate points in the story (and then stretched out across the church afterwards). I didn't do that (this time), but if you'd like to nick the idea should you ever want to use the story, please feel free (and let me know how it goes!) The reading was the famous passage from  John 6:1-21  about the feeding of the 5000 with five loaves and two fish. I read a sermon which encouraged us to think of ourselves not as the crowd, or the disciples, or eve n the boy in the story, but the bread. (It's very good... Go read it  here ). This story is my attempt to help people do that, to think of ourselves as bread; gingerbread. Hope you enjo...

This story was written for an all-age harvest service, and told on Sunday 9th October 2016. I enjoyed writing it, but it was tricky to ensure it appealed to (and had a message for) the adults and the very young children in the service.I hope I managed to get the balance right, and that you get something out of it too!   O NCE Upon A Time... many years ago; before you could order a takeaway from an app on your smartphone, before battery hens or McDonal d’s cows, back when all fruit and vegetables were organic, and all animals were free-range, back before potatoes were made into chips, before tomatoes were made into ketchup, or before meat was made into sausages, before even supermarkets were invented, there lived a small tribe of desert people. They lived – these desert people – in dusty desert tents, unsurprisingly, out in the hot, dry desert, near a great big mountain, as tall as the sky itself. Now, because supermarkets were not invented yet, this tribe of desert peopl...