As I said in my last post, I was not at St. John’s this week. As it was the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity I had been invited to the United Reformed Church in Caterham.

Things are done differently there as you’d expect. I had to give my sermon a title which was Four nouns in search of a verb. I also had to choose three readings with introductions. I came up with these:

Zephaniah 3.16-end: The Father says “I will gather you together.”
1 John 4.9-15: The Spirit says “I will dwell in you.”
Matthew 18.19-22: The Son says “I will be among you.”

Here is my sermon on the the theme of Unity.

Education isn’t what it used to be! As parents, and now grandparents, my wife and I have both felt that, as we have seen our children and grandchildren pass through the education system. It’s not really true, of course, but we all feel from time to time that the way we used to do things was better in the past. I remember not long ago, one of our daughters was struggling with one of her children over his grasp of English grammar. The problem was that when we tried to help she didn’t know what we were talking about when we started trying to explain parts of speech, sentence construction and so on. And almost with one voice we both said: ‘The trouble is you didn’t do parsing at school.’ Continue reading →