Category: Sermons
What I said this Sunday – Trinity 17
Here’s last Sunday’s sermon.
It has been called a sensational summer of sport.
Of course, we’re used to hyperbole from newspapers and television commentators, but for once they were right. And – against the expectations of so many crowning it all was what has now been called the greatest Olympics ever. And just in case you are inclined to believe all those who say that Britain is no longer ‘Great’ let me remind you that in both the regular Olympics and the Paralympics we came third in the medals table. The Paralympics were amazing. We were on holiday for most of it but I have caught up since with some of the footage. The biggest ever audience for a Paralympics. And how the athletes – both able-bodied and those with disabilities – have inspired us. The way that those with disabilities have been able to overcome those disabilities and compete on the world stage is truly amazing. And as for wheelchair rugby – from what I’ve read and seen it’s far more challenging than the regular game. The Paralympics have been so successful that some are now calling for it to be combined with the regular Olympics in future. Continue reading
What I said this Sunday – Trinity 16
Having had a few weeks off preaching – three weeks annual holiday, and then a visit from the archdeacon to rededicate our newly refurbished and rebuilt organ – it was back to normal last Sunday. Here’s what I said.
Many of you will remember the television series Dallas which ran for thirteen years from 1978. I don’t mind admitting I was addicted to it. It told the stories of the two brothers Bobby and J R Ewing and their constant power struggles with each other and with people like Cliff Barnes for control of the oil industry. It has recently been revived for a new series, currently being shown on Channel Five. And in last week’s episode, J R Ewing – in his 80s but still craving power and money, said to his son John Ross: “Nobody gives you power – real power is something you take.” Continue reading
What I said this Sunday – Trinity 11
Here’s my sermon for this week.
It was so much easier in the old days, when I was a child, when the bread man still came to the back door with his basket. The bread came straight from his bakery, freshly baked, and he delivered it door to door in his van. Because, like milk, it was delivered so nobody bothered buying it at the shop. Deciding what kind of bread to buy was easy. He sold white steamed or Hovis brown. That was it. Not even a choice between sliced or unsliced. If you wanted a sliced loaf you used a bread knife!
Some time ago – as some of you know because you have bought my bread Church sales – we got a bread maker. It can make 105 different loaves of bread. Continue reading
What I said on Sunday – Trinity 9
I decided to preach on the New Testament reading this week, from the letter of Paul to the Ephesians.
She always knew that if she kept out of the others’ way then she would be alright. She knew that if she just kept her head down then she wouldn’t be bullied. She understood that she would always be bottom of the pile. It was just how things were. And that worked fine. And they all managed to co-exist. And for all of her life that’s how things were for Flixie. And Fursey was happy as long as he ran the show. Continue reading
What I said on Sunday – Trinity 8
Here’s my sermon for last Sunday. The gospel reading is the feeding of the five thousand followed by Jesus walking to the disciples across the Sea of Galilee in the storm.
Ephesians 3.14-end; John 6.1-21
“There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” (John 6:9)
It’s been said that you should always expect the unexpected.
On the website Yahoo! Answers, a site where you can ask questions on any subject in the hope that someone else has the answer, someone posed the question “Do you always expect the unexpected?” To which someone else has replied: Continue reading
What I said on Sunday – Saint Mary Magdalene
This Sunday was the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene. Here is my sermon. During it I refer to an icon I have in my study of the Holy Myrrhbearing Women. I purchased it from the excellent Orthodox Store Skete.com and you can see details of the actual icon here.
Andrew Lloyd Webber wants to find Jesus. Continue reading
What I said this Sunday – Trinity 5
Here’s my sermon from last Sunday. During the sermon I mention the names of two clergymen from my past – I’ve changed the names to protect the innocent!
“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” (Mark 6:3)
There’s an old saying: “You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family!” Not absolutely accurate, of course, when you think about it – but essentially it means that your parents, your grandparents, your brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts – they are all who they are! You can’t just decide one day that if you don’t like them or aren’t getting on to change them for someone different. Friends you can change if you fall out – family you can’t. Families! We all have them, yet what a mixed blessing they can be! On the one hand, they can be a wonderful place of nurture and support. At the other extreme, they can be an awful place of hurt and abuse. But for the most part our experience of families is neither completely one nor the other, but full of contradictions. They can nurture and protect us, but also be stifling and discouraging at the same time. George Burns, the American comedian, once said “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family – in another city!” Continue reading
What the priest I live with said this Sunday – Trinity 4
We’ve had a bit of a break from preaching as you may have noticed. Two weeks ago we were in Rome having gone out for a conference and a short break added on to it, and last week was our annual parish pilgrimage to Walsingham. This week Mother Anne-Marie was preaching.
I expect virtually everyone of us here has been a Jairus or the women suffering from haemorrhages. I don’t mean literally but we will have sat at the bedside of a seriously ill friend or family member fervently wishing we could do something to make them well. Or we will ourselves have been ill with one of those chronic illnesses that most wear us down. The woman had been suffering for 12 years with something no physician could cure. Even in our day of medical and surgical solutions there are things doctors cannot make better. We can have hips and knees replaced but arthritis cannot be cured in the fingers or the feet and the pain wears people down. In our day the woman in the story might have been made better by a hysterectomy, but that carries with it a cost. Not everything, even today, can be put right Continue reading
What I said this Sunday – Trinity Sunday
Three things to cover this week, which seems rather appropriate for Trinity Sunday. First, Trinity Sunday itself. Second, we had a baptism of two children from the same family. Third, it was of course the Diamond Jubilee. The names of the children have been changed.
Those of you who are addicted to TV gameshows – and I’m sure that even if none of you would admit it you’re out there – will probably remember the hugely popular gameshow presented by former Butlins Redcoat Ted Rogers that ran for ten years from 1978 to 1988. In all that time it never had fewer than 12 million viewers, numbers that today’s television executives can only dream about. Personally, I’m baffled as to why it was so successful. It was, of course, 3-2-1 – the only show on TV where you could end up, if you were unlucky, winning a brand new dustbin and nothing else. Continue reading
What I said this Sunday – Pentecost
Here’s my sermon for Pentecost Sunday.
Many churches these days, like our own, use – instead of ordinary candles – oil-filled ones. The advantages are that they are cheaper, cleaner, and never appear to burn down. However long they burn for, they always look just like new. There is a downside though. You buy your oil-filled candle, put it in the candlestick, fill it with oil and light it. It looks wonderful. It burns away and never drips or gets any shorter. The problem is, though, that unless you regularly top it up with more oil, although it always looks alright it is getting emptier and emptier. And in the end it will just go out.
Christians are like oil-filled candles. They look fine on the outside. But they need regularly filling up on the inside – and you can’t tell from just looking at the outside when they’re getting empty. Like an oil-filled candle, a Christian needs a regular filling of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, although outwardly we may look fine, we just get emptier and emptier – and in the end we stop burning. And simply not notice that we’ve gone out!
Pentecost Sunday – the day the Spirit came, and thousands heard Peter speaking in their own tongues of what God had done. The day that Jesus did as he had promised, and sent the Holy Spirit from the Father to fill up the disciples. But why did the disciples have to wait after the Ascension for Jesus to send the Spirit? And why don’t we, today, seem to experience the Holy Spirit in the way that the disciples did then?
Who is the Holy Spirit? I expect many people in the Church would be hard pressed to answer that question with any clarity if it were put to them. We are clear about God the Father. We know who Jesus is. But not many know who the Holy Spirit is. We talk about one God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – but there is a tendency to have rather vague ideas about him. The New Testament tells us that the Holy Spirit is the person of the Godhead who dwells in us day by day. He gives gifts to his Church. There are several lists in the New Testament of gifts given by the Holy Spirit. They include such gifts as prophecy, miraculous powers, speaking in tongues as well as more down to earth gifts such as teaching, administration (yes, administration!) and helping others.
This is a Spirit who is at work in the Church – not just then, but now as well. A Spirit who comes to stir up the people of God – the apostles discovered that on the day of Pentecost when the Spirit came not like a gentle breeze, but a violent – think about that word – a violent wind. But if this is what the Holy Spirit is like, what does it mean for us as a group of Christians?
Canon John Gunstone describes in his book LIVE BY THE SPIRIT what preaching at Pentecost used to be like for him before he discovered the reality of the Holy Spirit: Trying to preach on Whit Sunday each year was an embarrassment. I just couldn’t think of anything to say. I rationalised the events narrated in Acts 2 as a dramatic mystical experience that was unique in the life of the apostolic Church, and I warned confirmation candidates not to expect anything like it today… If anyone had asked me (which they never did) how to receive more of the Holy Spirit into their lives, I would probably have mumbled something about saying prayers and receiving Communion.
Peter and the others experienced something dramatic – and Peter, as he preached to the crowds in response to those accusations of drunkenness, told them that God has poured out his Spirit as foretold by the prophetJoel.
That experience gave Peter a vision for the Church, a vision inspired by the Holy Spirit. What is our vision for the Church today? Do we have a vision at all? His vision of the new Church, the new community formed in the power of the Holy Spirit as a direct response to the death and resurrection ofJesusis, perhaps, different from our vision of what the Church should be. We have a tendency to limit our vision – if we have a small vision its easier to believe that it might come about. We lack faith in the power of God.
A report of the General Synod of the Church of England published in 1981 had the following to say about the difference between the Early Church and the Church of today and the way in which we attempt to devalue the message of Acts that the Church should be alive in the power of the Spirit: No amount of sterilisation of the Biblical message, and no amount of critical scholarship, have ever managed wholly to conceal the flow of the Acts narrative, and its message of a Spirit filled community facing persecution, working miracles, rejoicing in the power of God, and generally living a corporate “Pentecostal” life.
No matter how hard we might try, we cannot explain away the fact that the Early Church had something that we haven’t got. It had a freedom, a joyfulness, a carefreeness, a dimension of living in the Spirit, a willing self-surrender, an overflowing love, that does not seem to be evident in our Church today. The difference is highlighted by the fact that following Peter’s sermon more than three thousand people became Christians, yet today Churches inWestern Europe are shrinking. We are so accustomed to small churches that we accept them as normal. Church going in Western Europe is the lowest in the Christian world. Everywhere but in the West the Church is growing – in some places at a phenomenal rate. We need to discard the idea that the behaviour of the apostles at Pentecost and the gifts that they used in their ministry were unique to the Early Church. We need to allow the Holy Spirit of God to guide us and strengthen us and give us the gifts we need so that God’s kingdom might be glorified.
So let us allow the Holy Spirit to direct our lives as individuals and as a community. Because if we allow the Spirit to take control then the Church, in the words of Canon John Gunstone, will: be pulsating with the life of God, subject to his Word, anointed with his Spirit, constrained by his love, preaching his Good News, and ministering with his power.
Let each one of us, on this day of Pentecost, rededicate ourselves to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; pray that he will fill us anew with his Holy Spirit as he did the apostles, and that we may be open to the work that he wants to do among us, so that this Church may pulsate with the life of God. And then perhaps we can begin to live out our mission statement which appears at the top of your service sheet every week:
St John’s Church is called by God to be his people through faith in Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit: worshipping him, growing in holiness, making disciples and serving others.
View from the Valley 