The Good Samaritan

I suspect that if ask people what the message of the parable of the Good Samaritan is they will say something like, ‘Love your neighbour’ or ‘Go and do thou likewise’. There are hundreds of hospitals and charities in the world named after this parable. We all know about The Samaritans of course. The parable […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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The holiness of God

I have heard, and indeed preached,  quite a few sermons on this text from Isaiah. Most of them it has to be said at ordination or induction services. These are usually occasions marked by a frisson of nervousness, a strong sense of achievement and expectation,  and quite a lot of sandwiches and tea.  Sometimes, threaded […]

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God speaks even to the foolish….

One Christmas, when my daughter was quite small, I received a letter from her primary school that said on its first line, ‘Dear Mrs Durber, your daughter is an ass…’ and then the second line ‘in the school nativity play’. For a brief moment I had thought that this was an overly blunt assessment of […]

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