My Sermons

2 June 2024 Second Sunday after Pentecost 1 Samuel 3.1-10 Psalm 139.1-7,15-18 2 Corinthians 4.5-12 Mark 2.23-3.6 I remember once as a small boy staying over at my friend’s house, being asked to help set the table. “Just put this in the centre of the table, Evan”, said my friend’s mum. But it was a crystal bowl, it looked and felt precious, and I - felt so clumsy. I must have looked doubtful, because she said to me, “It’s OK. Just walk slowly.” And I carried it very carefully indeed - the bowl that was so delicate and that caught the light so beautifully. But the bowl and I both survived! It felt like a great trust had been placed in me - and a massive relief to get it safely to the table. After dinner, I stuck to the knives and forks! So today’s lessons are for ordinary, imperfect human beings who know they drop things, and get things wrong, and that they don’t quite measure up to the task of being servants of the light. Ordinary human beings - who respond to God’s calling in ordinar...

  Trinity Sunday Isa 6.1-8 Rom 8.12-17 Mark 1.9-11 So, it’s Trinity Sunday - a day on which traditionally the Church reflects on no less than the nature of God’s own life. On how Jesus as the eternal Word of God is a co-equal person of the Godhead and how the Holy Spirit as the mutual self-gifting love of Father and Son spills over in loving gift to all creation. To spill the beans on all that in a 15 minute sermon without committing any of the enticing but deadly heresies of the ancient Church. I’ve heard it suggested that Trinity Sunday is also the one day of the year on which your hardworking preacher is most likely to call in sick! Well, what if we forget the tricky theological formulas the Church has wrestled with for two millenia and ask ourselves, seriously, how do I personally imagine God? What picture comes to your mind when you think of God?  I remember once asking members of a parish study group to draw something that summed up what God “looked like” to them. Well, ...

Fifth Sunday of Easter 5 May 2024 One of the fables attributed to the 6th century BC Greek philosopher Aesop is about three lazy brothers who inherited a vineyard - along with a note from Dad claiming he had buried a treasure in gold amongst the vines. For years they dug diligently around the roots of the vines - never unearthing any gold but to their surprise producing better and better wine year after year.  Remember from last week? I’m the vine, Jesus tells us, and you are the branches. Your job is to abide in me because through me you have life. You need to hold on, and you need to be fruitful. If you are not being fruitful, then the life of the vine is not flowing through you and you have already separated yourself from the source of life. If you are being fruitful and you want to keep being fruitful - well then you need to submit to being pruned and shaped and disciplined by my love.  This is Jesus in truth-telling mode, it is the hard news of accountability - and it’s s...

 Sunday 28 April 2024 1 John 4.7-21 John 15.1-8 Many years ago I had a bad experience with pruning.  What made it worse, was it wasn’t my tree, it was at a place I was working.  ‘We just need to lop a couple of those over-hanging branches’, I suggested – trouble is, when I lopped them off it was obvious I needed to take a bit off on the other side to match.  Then it looked ridiculous because the side branches were short but it went straight up in the middle, so I had to get a step-ladder – every attempt to make it look symmetrical meant I had to take a bit more off somewhere else - by the end of the morning the damage was done.  All that was left was a couple of bare branches, and a solitary leaf.   Pruning isn’t a job for the faint-hearted.  It’s a job for realists, for people who know that a living thing needs to be able to direct its energies into areas of new growth, that dead and dying wood needs to be amputated and growth needs to be encoura...

Sunday 7 April 2024     1 John 1.1-2.2 John 20.19-31  Somebody once commented to me – I forget who, and I’m pretty sure it was meant to be a criticism – that Christianity was an early experiment in Communism. Which failed. Along the same lines, I do remember it was Mahatma Ghandi who once remarked that he thought Christianity was a good idea – and that somebody should give it a try. You get, of course, that I’m working my way around to talking about the first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles. Acts gives us a fascinating glimpse of the very early Christian community - a community in transition, still perhaps reeling from the discovery that has changed their lives and is set to change the world - that Jesus who was crucified is very much alive. A community expecting Jesus to come back again any moment and apparently waiting to be told what to do next - but most notably a community in which everything is shared, not just money and food, as they live and pray toget...

  JANUARY 5TH, 2024 So yesterday, the sixth of January, is the 12th and last day of Christmas. Along with giving your true love the dubious gift of twelve drummers drumming, it’s the correct day for taking down the Christmas tree and packing away the nativity set, and it’s also the date of the ancient festival of the Epiphany on which the early Church celebrated the incarnation of Jesus Christ. And the day for celebrating pagans getting it right, wealthy foreign stargazers who recognised the signs in the heavens that showed them the global importance of Jesus’ birth. Basically, the ancient world’s equivalent of scientists, in today’s terms astrologers, Matthew names them as magi or sorcerers from the East. Kings? Maybe not, but certainly rich and powerful and well-connected politically - and all of it set aside to traipse across the desert and pay homage to a baby born to a poor couple made homeless by a census. These days, the word ‘epiphany’ means a sudden happy realisation, the ...

17/12/2023 Last week, we started the season of Advent, with an ‘over the horizon’ look at the end of all things, coming in Mark’s gospel immediately after his darkly foreboding reference to the desecration of the temple and a time of terror. Something vague and portentous is coming! This week, on the second Sunday of Advent, things start to get more specific. We head back to the beginning of Mark’s Gospel for the beginning of the story and the announcement of the good news! Though what, you might wonder, could possibly be good news for the late first-century Jewish community Mark is writing for? It’s a time of war, somewhere near the brutal end of a seven-year uprising against the Roman occupying army, culminating in the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD. And the first 8 verses of Mark’s urgent war-time gospel makes a bold claim of good news for a people who have lived under occupation for a century or more and who now face the destruction – for the second time in their history – of the temp...