[opening text] “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoner to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour…” [Innoculation picture] […]
*It’s the annual fortnight of examination results. They’ve even reached into our Gospel reading. Peter is clearly sitting GCSE discipleship, for he’s given a multiple-choice question rather than an essay: “Who do you say that I am?” asks Jesus. “Some say, John the Baptist, others Elijah… [I say] you are the Messiah, the Son of […]
This week’s gospel gives us perhaps the most famous parable of all time. I recall it being the first reading I ever had to preach on as a curate. My heart fell: what more could you possibly say that hadn’t been said before about the sower! Sometimes, though, perhaps all a preacher needs to do […]
Sermon for Lent 4 (Mothering Sunday), Mark Laynesmith Everything has changed. Who imagined a week ago that we would be here? Back then, as I planned to preach this Sunday I had begun to think about speaking of Julian of Norwich. Julian was a female English mystic – she lived in (surprise surprise) Norwich and […]
Religion and Anxiety What is religion for? I know there are some Christians who don’t like to describe themselves as religious (‘they have a relationship with God, not a religion’) but I think it is a useful term. The root of the word ‘religion’ may mean to bind up again (the same root gives us […]
Luke 11:1-13, Year C, 7th Sunday after Pentecost (*names changed for privacy) Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a young woman. Life had been difficult for her. Her first husband had gone and she yearned for a new start. She wondered if life would provide it. Now, the woman’s […]
Our theme over the Lent has been that of ‘mediocrity’: the temptation from within to give up to bland uniformity or the pressure from without from political and religious powers to reduce the individual to the inconsequential or, as we’ve seen this morning so awfully on the news, to erase the individual entirely. Over-against these […]
By quirk of calendar, this day, the hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War comes to have two names: Remembrance Day (which is the name for the Sunday nearest the 11th), and Armistice Day, the day that marks the 11th itself. I’m intrigued by those two names, and the different emphases they […]
There is something of an irony about us town-dwellers continuing to observe harvest festival. I suspect only a very few of us will have harvested anything at all in the past year – or perhaps even in our lives: for many of us our harvesting might have been limited to picking a few blackberries during […]
Mark 4.26 At some point in human history, a simple but remarkable act of faith took place for the first time. Probably after a day of hard hunter-gathering, picking seeds from the heads of wild grasses, somebody somewhere consciously chose not to eat everything that had been gathered. Instead, someone, somewhere decided to take a […]