Sermons And Gubbins

This sermon was given on the morning of Sunday 11th August 2024, after a week of riots and counter-protests in the UK. The New Testament reading was Ephesians 4:25-5:2 . This morning’s Gospel is about bread. When we get to August every third year, we get John’s Gospel, and for about 6 weeks, we go through John Chapter 6, during which we talk a huge amount about bread. If you come to church in August this year without having had your breakfast first, you’re going to get hungry! I’ve actually preached in this slot both times over the last six years. Today marks my third sermon with these same readings. So, I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t actually preach on the gospel at all today?  Don’t worry, Caroline is preaching next week, and I’m sure she’ll cover the Gospel – unless she throws in a wild card? Instead then, for today’s sermon, I’d like to turn to our New Testament reading, from the letter to the Ephesians. There’s all sorts of scholarly thought about this letter that I don’t...

This sermon was preached at our Sunday morning service on 3rd July, when we celebrated the feast day of St Thomas. The Gospel that morning was John 20:24-29 . One of the things that makes humans so special is our ability to spot patterns. It’s one of the things that sets us apart from the rest of creation, and has allowed us to become creative beings ourselves. It’s a blessing, because it opens up the worlds of mathematics and science, and also of art and poetry. But, it’s also a curse, because we are prone to seeing patterns that are not actually there, and whilst sometimes, these can be benign – the face of Jesus in a slice of toast, for example – at other times, our incorrect joining of the dots can lead us to jump to very false conclusions. I don’t know if I’m jumping to false conclusions or not, but the pattern I’ve been seeing in the news this week is one of the stories of women. From the overturning of the Roe vs Wade abortion laws in the US last Friday, to the very different d...