Many people I know, and I guess I’m the person I know best, live with a sense that there are lots of things they just can’t do or will never do and all sorts of reasons and forces preventing them from being what God might want them to be. We might think we live in […]
Easter dawn..
You may have noticed how much reference there is to darkness and light in the Gospels, particularly when we get to the final chapters. In his account of the crucifixion Mark tells us that at midday (when the light should have been at its brightest) a darkness fell over the whole land, until three o-clock […]
We wish to see Jesus – a sermon by the Revd Iain McDonald
READINGS Hebrews 5: 5 – 10 John 12: 20 – 33 SERMON A stranger entered the church in the middle of the sermon and sat down in the back pew. After a while she began to fidget. Leaning over to a white-haired man at her side, evidently an old member of the congregation, she whispered: […]
Turning over the tables (and the pews…)
‘He made a whip of cords and drove them out of the temple, sheep, cattle and all.’ Sometimes I’m ashamed of myself because I can reflect coolly on things like hunger and poverty, but then I lose my rag because a driver cuts me up in the traffic queue or I can’t work out how […]
Take up your cross
‘He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of […]
Where the wild things are..
‘At once the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness, and there he remained for forty days tempted by Satan. He was among the wild beasts; and angels attended to his needs.’ Mark 1:12-13 I wonder whether, like me, you sometimes come across a verse of the Bible that you hadn’t really noticed before. It […]
Meeting God in the night..
I’ve noticed that one of the things that people sometimes ask is ‘Did you have a good night?’ It’s something to say on the first meeting of a conference when many people have travelled a long way – and you can exchange stories of jet lag or insomnia. We ask it of those at the […]
An epiphany!
Some of you will have seen my daughter on Christmas day. I’m going to break my rule about telling personal stories about your children just for today by telling you about something that happened when she was quite small – about nine years old I should think. She was taking judo classes once a week […]
Christmas Day glory…
We have seen his glory…. Glory – such a great word…. Wonder and splendour and holiness and wow.. all rolled into one… Someone I used to work with used to use it as a kind of exclamation – something happened and he would say ‘Glory!’ And the Gospel tells us that the angels sang ‘Glory […]
Letting Christmas be good news..
In Alison Pearson’s novel called ‘I don’t know how she does it’ there’s an opening scene which just about sums up one thing about Christmas for me. She’s a busy working mother and, in the kitchen very early one school day just before Christmas, she’s roughing up some shop-bought mince pies to make them look […]
Clothed with Christ
The parable of the wedding garment is a very strange one indeed – perhaps the strangest of the parables in the Gospels. It comes only in this Gospel, in Matthew, and it’s tacked onto Matthew’s souped-up version of Luke’s parable. I love the parable of the banquet – the way Luke tells it. I love […]
Like gentiles and tax-collectors
I can remember learning at some point in my life about how important that verse about ‘where two or three are gathered’ is to the Congregational tradition, to the bit of the church many of us here know best. It says, in a way, that what’s important about being the church is that some faithful […]