Sermons

The Parable of the Mustard Seed When I was a kid I once tried to grow a tropical rain forest in a wardrobe, in a bedroom in number six Sherwood in the house where I grew up. I decided to begin on the small scale. I began with a seed from out budgie’s cage. If […]

Trinity 1   2021      Mark 3 : 20-35 Let us pray: without you my table is empty, make haste O Lord and do not delay. Amen               (a prayer  from the inexhaustible treasury of the Imitation of Christ) The Collect for today, the 1st Sunday after Trinity, asks God to grant us the help of His […]

Trinity Sunday 2021. Isaiah 6.1 ‘holy, holy, holy..’ The vision of Isaiah is one we deeply familiar with; ‘holy. Holy, holy is the Lord’, the Lord of hosts; in every Eucharistic prayer it is sung, and often we use it to acclaim God, holy God, holy and strong, holy and almighty have mercy on us. […]

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” ***** “When the day of Pentecost had come …”: – it’s a completion. We’ve ceased singing the psalms at a sprint. We’re about to put away our special booklets. We won’t be sprinkling our praise and conversation so liberally with Alleluias. […]

(1 John 5:9-13; John 17: 6-19)           This period in the Church’s year can seem rather strange – our Lord has ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father, yet we are waiting for the Spirit to come down at Pentecost and settle upon the disciples; so that the Church can begin to […]

In last week’s Economist there was a photograph of a huge robot in the shape of a human being, and where its head should be there was a driving-cab with a real man inside operating the controls. That’s how we tend to think about our minds and our bodies. Our mind is the most important […]

The Gospel for St Philip and St James Day is part of Jesus’s farewell discourse with the disciples before he goes to face his enemies and the Last Enemy. The Lord speaks in riddles and paradoxes and the disciples’ questionings show both bewilderment and impatience. He talks of leaving them, of some unknown Comforter after […]

Some years ago I made a long retreat at St Beuno’s in Wales, that lovely Jesuit house where Gerard Manley Hopkins lived, and wrote the Wreck of the Deutschland. Each afternoon I would go out for a walk up and down the hills, enjoying that wonderful countryside, as Hopkins had done: “Lovely the woods, waters, […]

Luke 24. 36b-48 Unlike the other Gospels St Luke does not mention the disciples going to Galilee to see the risen Lord.  He tells his readers only about the appearances in and about Jerusalem leading up to the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles empowering them for the mission to all nations beginning […]

Gentle Jesus meek and mild/ Look upon a little child/ Pity my simplicity/ Suffer me to come to thee. When I was very young we used to sing that before going to bed at night. I won’t comment on it except to say that I am sure it is good for children to know that […]