Sermons

By Oswin CR, 15 November 2022 Today we are commending to the Lord our dear brother Crispin Harrison, known to his family as Michael, and saying our farewell to him in this earthly life; a brother who has lived in the hope of the Resurrection. Crispin was due to preach in this church three weeks […]

Sermon – 3 before Advent 2022. We are solidly back in the season of Unsettling Scriptural Readings, aren’t we? As we move towards Advent Sunday and the beginning of the new church year, the readings become increasingly apocalyptic and concerned with the last things – an emphasis which will, of course, only increase once we […]

Bernard Strozzi 1581-1644 a student of Caravaggio painted this scene of the calling of Zacchaeus. Let’s look at some of the features and see what the artist is trying to tell u. The most striking feature in the foreground is the boy with his dog. This is not recorded in the Bible and I have […]

Then Jesus told them a parable… In the name of the Father… Isn’t it nice when the Evangelists tell us what Jesus’s parables are about before we’ve even had a chance to read them? “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” Well, there we are […]

Luke 17:5 5The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” 6The Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.         One of the delights of Luke’s gospel – no other gospel has […]

Dives & Lazarus When I left university, just turned 22, I got a teaching job in Italy. It was poorly paid – I earned the equivalent of £53 a month, and of that £21 went in rent. That left me a little less than £8 a week to live on. And I was running a […]

TRINITY 13 Jer 4.11-12, 22-28     1 Tim 1.12-17      Lk 15,1-10 During the coronation of Queen Elizabeth she was presented with a Bible by the moderator of the Church of Scotland.  At many of the Christmas Day messages the Queen has said the life and teaching of Jesus is the foundation of her life.  We pray […]

Luke 13: 10-17 Healing “…the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things being done by him.” I can imagine it, or I can imagine it in an African context. We can imagine the woman crying out with joy when she found she could stand up straight; maybe dancing a few steps. We can […]

“I came to bring fire to the earth.” This is unlikely to be the good news from Jesus we most want to hear this morning. Fire destroys. And our first thoughts easily turn to our vulnerability. One piece of news this week has been that a house-end mural in London depicting the fires of Armageddon […]

THE RICH FARMER.  Luke 12: 13 – 21 My first reading of the story we have just heard made me feel rather smug. Here is a character it is easy to dislike – a rich, self-indulgent farmer. He has had fantastic crops. This is probably because he owns a lot of slaves, who have to […]