Sermons And Gubbins

This sermon was given at our Sunday morning service on 29th March. Obviously, due to Covid 19, there was no opportunity to meet in person, so we have been experimenting with doing a mixture of pre-recorded and live services - you can check us out on Facebook - St Michael's, Flixton . If you'd prefer to see me deliver this sermon instead of reading it, there's a youtube link directly below. If you'd rather not turn your speakers on just now, then please read the transcript instead. Peace be with you!   There’s been a good deal of advice around recently about looking on the bright side of this strange situation we all find ourselves in. Sometimes, if we’re unable to find time ourselves, it is good to be forced to take a step back and evaluate, with time to sit, and think, and reflect and pray. I hope, for you, this time of self-isolation and social distancing is a time in which you have been able to do some of these things. For me, so far, it has not been. ...

This sermon was first given at our Sunday morning service on 9th February 2020. The Gospel reading for that morning was  Matthew 5:13-20 . More years ago than I care to remember I was in a school production of  Godspell . I played Father Abraham as a tiny four-foot-nothing 12-year-old with a Charlton Heston-style American accent. In my head, my voice was deep, mid-west and drawling, but – as my voice really hadn’t broken by then, I probably actually squeaked most of my way through my speech and my song!  It’s very funny how I can still remember all the lyrics and my lines – words I learnt over 25 years’ ago – but if you were to ask me to remember any of the things I was supposed to be learning and storing in my long-term memory at school, I would draw a complete blank! But the words to a musical I was in in 1991? Yup, I’ve still got them down-pat. Word-for-word. Don’t worry though – I won’t subject you to a solo of ‘ Learn your Lessons Well ’ just now...

I've been thinking a lot about our reading from the Old Testament this week. It's probably the most famous section from the book of Ecclesiastes, and many of us probably know it as a pop song, rather than a quotation from the Bible - from the song ' Turn! Turn! Turn! ', made famous by The Byrds in the 1960s. The concept that there is a season for all things under the sun has been what's got me thinking this week. In the past four days, I've been to two funerals. I've absolutely been thinking about there being a time to weep, a time to mourn, and a time to die. For one of the funerals I attended, that idea of 'a time to die' was fitting. Marion was 91 years' old. She and her husband Philip had raised a son, of whom they had excellent reasons for feeling proud, seen their two granddaughters grow into successful and strong women, and lived to see and enjoy the presence of four beautiful great-grandchildren, the latest being Miriam, my daughter....

This sermon was given at our Remembrance Sunday service on Sunday 10th November 2019. The first Remembrance Day took place one hundred years ago, almost to the day. Back then, Remembrance Sunday wasn’t a thing. People commemorated the end of the “Great” War – the “war to end all wars” – on the anniversary of Armistice Day itself. It was only after the Second World War that services such as this, on the closest Sunday to the 11th November became common place, overtaking, if not replacing, the observance of a minute’s silence on the actual anniversary of the end of that first world war. But, before that, between the two world wars, the vast majority of the population of the UK marked an act of remembrance specifically on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month every year. That tradition has been revived within the last 40 years or so, and now, many workplaces across the country will also hold a minute’s silence tomorrow morning too. A colourised photo of...

There’s a phrase – five small words – that people utter when they’re trying to empathise with you. People say it with the best of intentions, trying to bridge a gap of grief or loss, attempting to reach out and find some common ground. It’s a phrase that tries to be kind; that tries to be helpful. … I think it’s the most annoying phrase in the English language: “ I know how you fee l”. I’m sure I’ve uttered it before, and I’m thankful I wasn’t met with a swift slap in the face, to be honest. It’s certainly what I’ve felt like doing when people have said it to me. Because, the thing is, standing here in this pulpit tonight, I don’t know how you feel. I’ve not lost a partner or a mother or a father, or a daughter or a son. I’ve not lost a brother or a sister. I have lost other relatives, and my life is unequivocally emptier without good friends I have known who have died in years gone by. I also carry with me the grief of nearly ten years of my wife and I being unable to ...

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 our Sunday morning service on August 25th. It was my first Sunday back after my paternity leave. The sermon borrows heavily from one I gave in Oldham three years earlier , but I think that's ok! The gospel this morning was Luke 13:10-17 . Hope you enjoy... It’s lovely to be back up here in the pulpit this morning. It’s been quite a long time since I last preached, and I’m really thankful that Huw, Alex, Cath, Fi and Vaughan have picked up the extra services and sermons whilst I’ve been off on paternity leave. Thank you all! The ministry team here are fortunate to have the freedom of being in a large team that allows one of us time off when needed. Even with that, however, the time has still gone pretty quickly, though! My last sermon before Miriam was born was right at the beginning of June, and I wasn’t on the rota to do anything then until after she was born. She was 6-weeks-old on Friday, and this is my first time back in the pulpit sinc...