Sermons And Gubbins

This poem was written for our Sunday morning service on Sunday 28th April, the second Sunday of Easter. The gospel reading was John 20:19-31 . In the news that week had been the horiffic bombings in Sri Lanka and the murder of Irish journalist, Lyra McKee . The poem was inspired by the idea of resurrection being a process as espoused in this sermon by Michael K. Marsh, especially this quote:   " The facts are just the starting point for the story. The fact of the empty tomb is the starting point for the resurrection story. Whatever facts you woke up to on Easter Monday are simply the starting point for your story of resurrection. Too often, however, we take the facts as the entire story. Isn’t that what we’ve done with St. Thomas?"  I think we certainly do think of Thomas like that - he is the perennial doubter, rather than the saint who brought Christ's message to India, and had grown so much in faith that he was prepared to die for his God. It made me wonder wh...

This sermon was preached at our Evensong service on Sunday 24th March, a week that had been pretty eventful in the political life of the UK, as the country prepared to leave the EU - the original 'Brexit Day' was supposed to be 29th March, but at this point in time, who knows if/when it will be! The Old Testament reading for the evening was Genesis 28:10-19 . Hope you enjoy the sermon... What a week it’s been for the UK politically! As the now-potentially-postponed Brexit-day loomed ever nearer, concerns this week grew amongst the public and politicians over the possible impacts of the UK leaving the EU with no deal. We’ve heard about all sorts of planned emergency operations on how as a country we’ll mitigate any fallout, including measures to control traffic, a ministry of defence underground control-centre and the stockpiling of food and medicine; and across social media, the UK’s fastest growing petition has been shared thousands of times garnering literally mill...

This sermon was preached at our Sunday morning service on 3rd March 2019, shortly before the start of Lent. The Gospel that morning was Luke 9:28-36 , and the Old Testament reading was Exodus 34:29-35 .   I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the Comic Relief Kilimanjaro climb on the BBC over the past week? Nine celebrities, including BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker, Strictly Come Dancing judge, Shirley Ballas and Pointless quiz-host Alexander Armstrong have been recreating the original Comic Relief celebrity mountain climb from 10 years ago. To all accounts, it’s been a gruelling journey up Africa’s highest mountain. There’ll be a documentary on TV on 13 th March which should make for interesting viewing! Mount Kilimanjiro I must be honest, though, there’s not many of these celebrity endurance charity tasks that gain my attention. I’m aware David Walliams did some swimming a few years ago, and there was, of course, Eddie Izzard’s marathon of marathons for S...