O God, if prayer is like sun-bathing, then let us enjoy the warmth of your love sweeping over us tenderly warming the coldness of sorrow or the greyness of our down beat days, and bringing light to flood the dark…. Amen
We all have dark places…
Jesus is in Jerusalem for a festival. But he goes first of all not straight to the Temple, but to the place where the sick gather hoping for a cure. A bit like going to London for the Lord Mayor’s parade, but getting off the train to go first to an overcrowded AandE department or […]
Easter prayer
May Hallelujah be my song. May joy defeat my sorrow. My life revive my dying days. For Christ is risen, creation revived, and I am made new! Hallelujah! Amen!
I rise!
Today is the greatest day of the Christian year! Rowan Williams recently said that the death and resurrection of Jesus is the centre point of all human history. That’s quite a day! And as if that wasn’t enough, today I want to say that what we celebrate right now is not only Jesus’ overcoming […]
Palm Sunday procession…
I wonder whether you have ever walked, or marched, or cart-wheeled, or sambad, in any kind of procession. My very earliest memory of all is of watching my father march with the band at a naval base – I was about two years old. I can remember the beating of the drum and the sound […]
Overflowing love…
Last week I baked a simnel cake for us to share after church. Traditionally you put eleven little balls of marzipan on the top because they represent the apostles – without the traitor Judas. But I always put twelve on anyway – because I feel sorry for him. And because one of the sermons I […]
A scandalous story…
Some of the hardest passages to preach on in the Bible are the most familiar ones. Whatever can remain to be said about the parable of the Prodigal Son that has not been said before and probably rather well? When you know it’s going to be the Prodigal Son, most of might be tempted to […]
The theological problem
Sometimes there are days when the Bible seems a million miles away from where we are and the concerns we actually live with – all those verses about not eating prawns or wearing shirts made of mixed fibres, all those dreams and visions of fantastic beasts with horns at the end time, and even […]
People will come from North and South and East and West…
Now, you are going to think this is rather odd, but I want first of all today to turn to the Old Testament reading that we heard and speak on behalf of the Canaanite Liberation Front, the Popular Front of the Kadmonites, and the Free the Kenites Campaign. We heard what sounds like a rather […]
A prayer for Lent
God, beside me, I ask you to accompany me through the days of Lent, and set my feet on the way of Jesus, that I may walk on my pilgrimage with a steady pace, breathing deeply of your Spirit and nourished by your grace.
The golden rule…
Jesus said, ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you.’ The early Church grew, not by holding great public mission events, not by holding worship that was accessible to newcomers or attractive to teenagers – but just because people could see that Christians lived lives that were really different from every around […]
Citizens of heaven… on a world mission Sunday
‘our citizenship is in heaven….’ Philippians 3:2 World mission – two words that put together can mean lots of different things. We tend, these days I think, to feel more comfortable about world development than world mission. So somehow this can feel like a rather abstract subject – something to think about. Today I really […]