Sermons

Mark 2: 23 – 3: 6     Keeping the Sabbath It’s easy to mock the Pharisees or criticize them for their strict rules for keeping Sabbath. Yet it was not they who invented the Sabbath. That came from the hand of God on Mount Sinai. Keeping the Sabbath is at the heart of the Mosaic Law. […]

It was utterly compelling. It’s not so easy for us to realize that the message that Jesus brought to the ancient world made people sit up in amazement. In a world full of us-and-them attitudes, Jesus told people to love one another. In a world full of vindictiveness and conflict, he told them to love […]

About ten years ago my (then) teenage nephew introduced me to the world of Percy Jackson. We were both present at a baptism and I noticed that he was reading a novel during the whole of the service. It was probably part of some teen bush warfare expressing his disapproval of the service or his […]

Sermon on John 17: 6-19 Everybody who reads the Gospel of John and in particular the Farewell Speeches knows how repetitive and almost redundant John’s language is. In our Greek translation group we found, that if you could be bothered to memorize a limited amount of Johannine key terms you would have made a prudent […]

“By this we know that we love the children of God … ” *********************************************** The Johannine writings turn faster and faster around the word ‘love’. We’ve been hearing a lot of it in the readings from The First Letter of John at Evensong this past week. Occasionally, as our heads spin, the texts throw out […]

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. In the name of the Father… There is a kind of sequence discernible in the Resurrection appearances in the gospels, a sequence in which we witness the disciples’s growing capacity to grasp the implications of the Resurrection […]

This is a first for me. While in the parish, I was never able to use the readings for the fourth Sunday of Lent. Instead, we always used the alternate readings set, those for Mothering Sunday. I had thought that that was a difficult subject to preach on in the middle of the Lenten season, […]

The cleansing of the temple  A friend of mine lives in a small market town, and the first time I visited him, he took me to see the medieval parish church.  It was quite a big church, and the whole nave was taken up with stalls selling everything from bricabrac and electronics to books and […]

Lent 2. Mark 8: 31-38 Silly old Peter. He got it wrong again! It’s easy to say that, isn’t it? We know the rest of the story. We know that out of the suffering and death on the Cross comes the Resurrection. Peter didn’t know that. If we had been in his shoes we would […]

The incarnation works in 2 directions – it is a break-in and a break-out. God breaks into our world, like an asteroid, leaving a crater and changing the atmosphere. This sounds dramatic, but it is not easy for but we have to grasp the scale of what has happened. We get on with our little […]