Luke 10.25-37: When I was christened, my Godmother Margaret gave me this gift. You might recognise it as a popular painting from about a hundred years ago by Margaret Tarrant, called The Lesser Brethren. It depicts Jesus out walking in an English countryside covered in our beloved animals, including red squirrels, foxes, badgers, deer and […]
June 23rd 2019, Pentecost 2 1 Kings 19:1-4, 8-15a Luke 8:26-39 Today’s OT reading from 1 Kings 19 reveals a very human side to one of the Bible’s ‘big men’. The prophet Elijah had just won what we could call a ‘competition’ with the prophets of the pagan god Baal in which he built an […]
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, John 16:12-15 It’s a double whammy today. As well as the church celebrating Trinity Sunday.. that apparently fearsome preaching Sunday for wary (or over-zealous) curates. It’s also Father’s Day… (happy father’s day!) So to first wish you a happy Father’s Day I’ll begin with a suitable ‘Dad Joke’…. I think I want […]
Today is Pentecost Sunday. It falls on the same day as Jewish festival of Shavuot celebrating both the wheat harvest and giving of the law on Mount Sinai. The word ‘Pentecost’ comes from the Greek for the 50th day, because Shavuot was 7 weeks and a day after Passover Sabbath (Lev 23vv15-16). The festival was […]
Acts 1.1-11, Luke 24.44-end On Sunday Gary spoke about prayer being like a pause, that moment when everything is suddenly still, as if holding its breath. I want to suggest that the ascension is this sort of pause – a kind of still point between the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at […]
Before we begin today, can i invite you to join me in closing your eyes and takes some moments to attend to the action of breathing.. . The Hebrew tradition considers the breath (inhaling and exhaling) is the same as making the sound ‘Yah-weh’ of the first inhaling breath “I will bless the LORD (YHWH) […]
I was going through my old boxes in the attic recently and came across this gift my mum knitted for me many years ago. Can you recognise it? Just like the Time Lord, Dr Who, today I’m going to take you on a journey through time and space to a place shrouded in mystery. In […]
Waking up and getting up has never been easy I wonder what wakes you up in the morning, what inspires you to rise and get on with the day? For this late night traveler, posting on twitter, who’d fallen asleep at the bus stop, it was this…! Today is the fourth Sunday of Easter.. and […]
John 20.19-31 ‘The doors were locked for fear of the Jews’. ‘The doors were locked for fear…’ Our gospel narrative today comes from John the evangelist, one of our patron saints, and traditionally identified with the disciple described as the one whom Jesus loved. Two resurrection appearances are described here, and only in John. Firstly, […]
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 […]