Epiphany 6/1/19 Good morning! Where were we… Hope you all enjoyed your New Year celebrations. And have a feast of New year’s resolutions? Did you know today women are scattered hither and thither across Ireland celebrating “Nollaig na mBan”? They will be passing off house work to the men and saying goodbye to the Christmas […]
Luke 2.41 – end ‘WITH HIS COUSINS’ A week ago, here after church, I spoke with Rob and Vicky Jones as Rob held in his arms their young, deliciously smiling, Timothy Francis, whom Vicky volunteered she could easily lose for an hour or two when they met up the next day with adoring relatives! I […]
It’s Christmas Day.. yay!.. We’ve made it all the way.. all the way through endless dinner, parties, singalong a Christmas hits, tinsel and tat and now we arrive, like the shepherds and Mary and Joseph, at this humble stable in Bethlehem… and look upon this great thing which has occurred… But the great thing… makes […]
We were pleased to welcome +Andrew to join with our Patronal Celebration during the final days of Advent I realised – this week – that only once – in nearly 40 years of ministry – have I kept the feasts of St. Stephen, St John – and – the Holy Innocents – as feasts of […]
Advent 3 – Zephaniah 3.14-20, Luke 3.7-18 This Sunday we have lit a candle for John the Baptist. Last Sunday when we were considering prophets in general we heard the first part of Luke’s description of John. He was a prophet who preached baptism for the forgiveness of sins. He was called to be in […]
Feast of Christ the King Daniel 7. 9 – 14 | John 18. 33 – 37 I expect that Matthew Bridges, the young academic from Durham, tried a few days ago on charges of spying in the UAE, and there sentenced to life imprisonment, will soon be released and allowed home. Whatever the story – […]
Mark 131-8, Daniel 121-3: End Times Kingdom 3, 18th November 2018 Would you like to know the future? Could be handy if you could place bets on horse races knowing the result in advance; though perhaps not entirely honest. When you first think about it, it sounds interesting, and you can think of lots of […]
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 […]
40th Anniversary 28 October 2018 Genesis 28.11-18, Matthew 21.12-17 The 1970s were a challenging time for the church. It looked as though religion would play a smaller and smaller part in the lives of people. Church attendance was falling, but the C of E still had large churches to maintain. There had been much building […]
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 […]