Recent Sermons

Sunday 29 June 2025. St Peter & St Paul

By David Richardson (Licensed Preacher)

So, we find ourselves in Petertide - a time for the making of priests, who have chosen to follow Peter’s path of sacrificial leadership. We hold Frances in our loving prayers as he is ordained this morning in Dorchester.

And today we honour the tradition of co-celebrating, alongside St Peter, our other mighty patron, St Paul.

Two extraordinary men, with a fair claim to be the twin pillars on which the church has been built - pillars represented in a literal way by our Victorian forebears in the two sculptures underpinning the first arch on either side of the nave in the Parish Church.

If these had been life size statues, I suspect the arches would have been asymmetrical! In the apocrypha, Paul is described as “small in size, bald-headed, and bandy-legged.” And Paulus, the name he took after abandoning his life as a Pharisee enforcer, means small or short.

Whereas at least in my mind, Peter - the sinewy fisherman, given “personal branding” by Jesus as The Rock - stood tall. Although that might be the influence of popular art! In childhood I had Ladybird books telling the stories of both Jesus and Robin Hood. In the colourful 1950’s illustrations Peter and Little John looked remarkably similar!

But their putative stature was no means the only difference between our two Saints.

Peter was working class and quite possibly illiterate. He lived alongside our Saviour, sharing lodgings, food, wine and dusty journeys with Him. His love of Jesus was warm-blooded and tactile. As the disciples are returning from a night’s fishing and Christ appears on the shore it’s Peter who jumps off the boat and swims to the beach, eager to greet The Boss, no doubt with a big bear hug.

Paul on the other hand was a Roman citizen, an educated Pharisee, with an impressive line in rhetoric, holding his own among the intellectual snobs of Athens. Not having known Jesus in His earthly life, he applies cerebral power, a grasp of the abstract and a powerful gift with language to guide us towards a faith-based relationship with Christ.

While for Paul the pen is mightier than the sword, Peter was what my East End cousins would call “a bit tasty in a punch up”. When Jesus was arrested, it was Peter who drew a blade and committed ABH on the high priest servant’s ear.

So, men from different worlds. But who’s paths crossed. We know that they met.

In Acts we see Paul (and Barnabus) join Peter (with James, John and other apostles) in what we now call the Council of Jerusalem. This meeting in about 50 AD, endorsed Paul’s mission to the Gentiles and confirmed that converts were not required to follow Jewish religious law.

There was tension between the two men. In Pauls’ letter to the Galatians, he says: “When Peter came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party”. He’s getting at Peter for being influenced by those holding on to Jewish tradition and backing off from taking the gospel to the Gentiles.

And the criticism went both ways. In the Second letter of Peter, we get more than a hint that Peter (or his followers - depending on where you stand on authorship) saw Paul’s declamatory style as overcomplex, as too clever by half.

“Our beloved brother Paul” says Peter “wrote…according to the wisdom given him… There are some hard things to understand in his letter, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction…”  And he has a point. Here’s an extract from last week’s reading from Paul’s 2^nd letter to the Corinthians. Good luck picking the bones out of that!

But…in focusing on the differences between Peter and Paul there is of   course a risk of caricaturing the complex, nuanced individuals that they clearly were.

For example, we simplistically see Peter as the intuitive and passionate one, Paul as strategic, intellectual, with lower empathy. But look again at Paul’s language in our reading from the second letter to Timothy: “I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith”.

These words are not mere rhetorical flourishes but an authentic expression of emotion, just as heartfelt as Peter’s glorious flash of insight in declaring “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Both were truly passionate men. And if I were looking for one word to describe both Peter and Paul “passion” would be right up there. But I think, actually, I would choose the word…Courage.

I’m going to suggest that Peter and Paul offer us two inspirational lessons in courage.

First, they maintained their unstinting commitment to the expansion of Christ’s church at a time of savage oppression. It was a world ruled from Rome by Nero and in Judea by his puppet Herod Agrippa. Nero had killed his own mother to consolidate power, and when a fire blazed through Rome in 64 AD, he identified Christians, then a small, marginalised, unpopular group, as the ideal scapegoat – infamously meting out horrific punishment in public displays of cruelty.

This was the dangerous context in which Peter and Paul were supercharging the growth of the early Church. A risk-filled world in which Paul, especially, travelled widely and with indefatigable energy, through storm and shipwreck.

In today’s readings we get a real sense of this jeopardy - and the physical courage, the gutsiness, with which our heroes faced it: a miraculous prison escape for Peter; and Paul looking into the face of his impending martyrdom.

So Peter and Paul’s first lesson in courage is to show us how to live in a time of global danger, a time of tyrannical leaders, a time of victimisation and prejudice. They teach us that we should lift our heads, undaunted and unafraid, even in dark times, holding onto our faith in a Saviour who has conquered the darkness.

Both men were executed in Rome, at the command of Nero – Peter in 64 and Paul in 67 AD. Paul was beheaded, reflecting his Roman citizenship and is buried in a place now called Tre Fontane.

Peter was crucified in the Circus Maximus and buried in the Greco-Roman cemetery on the nearby hill, which was later covered under metres of earth when the ground was levelled to build St Peter’s Basilica. The cemetery and St Peter’s tomb were excavated in the 1950s and 60s. Today, the Officio Scavi accepts a few pre-booked visitors on certain days of the week, and after advice from Father John Salter, Clare and I were able to visit it some years ago, using a protocol to get past the Swiss Guards that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Dan Brown novel!

It was one of the most inspiring experiences of our lives. With the building of the basilica over his tomb, Peter has almost literally become the stone on which that church was built!

I said that Peter and Paul offer two lessons in courage. We’ve spoken about their bravery in the face of external threat. But I find even more impressive the courage with which they addressed their own internal failings and weaknesses – the strength they found, in faith, to forgive themselves (knowing God’s forgiveness) and to step forward past their mistakes.

Before his conversion, Paul, then named Saul, had been a fierce persecutor of the Church, implicated in the death of the first Christian martyr, Stephen. “I was convinced that I ought to do many things against the name of Jesus of Nazareth” he says. “…I not only locked up many of the saints in prison, but also cast my vote against them when they were being condemned to death (and) furiously pursued them.”

Peter of course plumbed his own dark depths, desperately denying his saviour three times after Christ’s arrest, abandoning, in that moment of crisis, the man he knew to be the Son of the Living God. And even at perhaps his best moment, named by Christ as the rock on which His church would be built, read on from today’s gospel and within a few minutes you find Peter blundering again – and Jesus having to rebuke him. “You are a hindrance to me” Christ says, “…setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

But however low they fell, back they came, and on they went, with their world-changing mission.

It is this resilience in the face of personal weakness and failure, this determination to power though shame and regret, in faith, harnessing the Holy Spirit’s power of renewal, that is Peter and Paul’s second lesson in courage, showing us that no matter how low we fall, we can climb back again, stand fast and carry on in the Grace of God.

Amen

Sunday 15 June 2025. Trinity Sunday

By Revd Canon Hugh Wybrew (Visiting Preacher)

I’ve been wondering how to begin this sermon for several weeks. My mind has been a blank. Then quite recently it came to me that the blank was in fact the best way to begin. But don’t worry, we’re not going to have ten minutes silence, nor am I going to ask you to say what you think of when you hear the word ‘God’ – tho’ I’d love to know.

You might imagine an old man in the sky, with white hair and a white beard. That’s a biblical image: Daniel in the Old Testament had a vision of God as the Ancient of Days: ‘His raiment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool’ (7.9).

But that and all such images are misleading: We can’t imagine God, because God is spirit, and so invisible. Yet God is everywhere; as Paul told the Athenians, ‘in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17.28). Not only are we in God, but God is in us. The C16th Spanish nun Teresa of Avila wrote: ‘We are not forced to take wings to find him, but have only to seek solitude and look within ourselves.’ Even so, we can’t imagine God, we can’t grasp God with our minds. That doesn’t mean we can’t know God. There’s an anonymous C14th English treatise called, ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’. The author wrote: ‘Of God himself no one can think. He may well be loved, but not thought. By love he may be grasped and held, by thought never.’
So how is it that Christians came to think of God as Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit?

Several centuries before Jesus was born, the Jews had come to believe there was only one God. He had a name, but that was too holy to utter, so they called him ‘the Lord’. That made Judaism unique among contemporary religions, which believed in lots of gods and goddesses. The Lord is beyond human knowledge. But, as today’s first reading tells, he is present and active in his Wisdom,. He’s also present and active in his Word: ‘By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made’, says Psalm 33 (v.6); and the Word, says John at the beginning of his gospel, is God.

Jesus was born and grew up in this Jewish religious tradition. He began to preach and teach: he gathered round him a small group of disciples. As they travelled around Galilee with him, they came to realise that Jesus was doing things that only the Lord could do. He healed people, he calmed storms. In Jesus, the Lord was present and active. ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’, says John (1.14); and in today’s gospel, he sums up the disciples’ experience of the Lord’s presence in Jesus when he has Jesus say, ‘All that the Father has is mine’. John identifies Jesus with the divine Word; Paul in his first letter to the Christians at Corinth, calls Jesus Christ ‘the Wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1.24), and when Jesus was baptised, he was declared to be the Son of God (Mt 3.17). In Jesus, the invisible God lived visibly among us.

Jesus’ physical life came to an end. But after his death the disciples experienced his living presence within them. In the prophecy of Ezekiel the Lord had promised to put his spirit within his people (Ezekiel 36,27). That had now happened. So Paul could write to the Romans: ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us.’ The experience of the Holy Spirit is the experience of God within us. The Father is God beyond us; the Son is God among us; the Spirit is God within us.

It took the Church three hundred to agree on a form of words to express that essential Christian experience of God. The first Ecumenical Council was held in Nicaea, not far from Istanbul, in AD 325. The bishops agreed a text that became the Nicene Creed that we say every Sunday. It sums up the Christian faith in the one God, who has made himself known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

What the Creed doesn’t say is much more significant. In his first Letter, John says ‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God, for God is love’ (4.8). The Christian experience of the one God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is that God is Love. God in himself is beyond our imagining; but the God who is Love can be known. To repeat what the Cloud of Unknowing says, ‘Of God himself no one can think. He may well be loved, but not thought. By love he may be grasped and held, by thought never.’  Amen

Sunday 25 May 2025. Sixth Sunday in Easter

By David Richardson (Licensed Preacher)

Form today’s gospel: The Advocate the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything. And from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: I get by with a little help from my friends.

We are a fortnight from Pentecost and if, next month, you want a sign that Pentecost has arrived, look out for the vicar’s red stilettos – that being of course the liturgical colour for the season.

But although it’s not yet Pentecost, our readings this Sunday are already turning the spotlight on the Holy Spirit: who Christ speaks of in today’s gospel; who dramatically animates the dry bones in our reading from Ezekiel (I’ll resist breaking into song!), and who is at work as Lydia and her household are baptized by Paul.

I have to confess that the Holy Spirit is the member of the Trinity that I find hardest to wrap mind and heart around.

God the Father, yes: I sense His presence pulsing through creation. God the Son, yes: my imagination and my love are fired by the luminous story of His birth, ministry, death and resurrection.

But the Holy Spirit?

I believe in Him, but seem to see Him through a glass darkly, intangible, elusive, slipping through my fingers like quicksilver.

So I took today’s readings as a personal challenge to do better in my understanding of Him.

The Greek word used to describe the Holy Spirit in John’s Gospel (and I believe only in this Gospel) is paraklétos or paraclete. In ancient Greece a paraklétos was someone who provided legal counsel, advocacy, and more: in fact almost every form of advice, support and personal encouragement. Thus, we find the word translated in the Gospel as counsellor, advocate, teacher and comforter.

Just before I go on, let me address the delicate subject of pronouns. I realise that in the 21^st century this is where angels fear to tread. Paraklétos is a masculine noun, but the underlying Greek word for spirit "pneuma" (with a silent p) is gender neutral, and in Hebrew the word for "spirit", Ruach, is feminine. This morning I’ll stick with the male pronoun for the Holy Spirit, but very aware of the false limitation this places on His, Her or Their Person!

So back to the role of Paraklétos – as counsellor, advocate, teacher, comforter.

It occurred to me that a way into thinking about how the Holy Spirit operates and more importantly, how we should respond to Him, might be to speak with friends in the parish who have, or have had, careers in the advocacy, teaching and caring professions. We are all made in God’s image, so what might their human experience in those vocations tell us about how the Spirit works?

I had conversations with: Simon Hunter, barrister and counsel in the complex world of commercial law; with Jane Haine and Sandra Ord, who have been teachers for (I won’t say quite how many) decades; and with Jenny Gillespie, who’s career as an RAF nurse took her into  - and, we thank God, brought her back from - the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

I spoke and corresponded with each of these wonderful people, about their experiences, their values, their ethos, and the practicalities of fulfilling their “Paraclete vocation”.

Based on those conversations I’m going to offer three aspects of their experience that might help us to think about the way the Holy Spirit works – and how we can fulfil our relationship with Him.

All of my friends spoke of their role as a form of performance. It seems that as a paraclete you must project energy to build confidence – which I think gives an immediate clue to the working of the Spirit. But Jane, Sandra, Jenny and Simon also observed that teaching, nursing and advocacy are most effective when they are based on a two-way relationship, not done to the person receiving care, but with them. The pupil, the litigant, the patient, need to respond actively to what is offered, to build their side of a bridge of trust with their teacher, counsellor, or carer.

This suggests to me that while the Holy Spirit may occasionally sweep into our lives like a rushing wind, He is more likely to enter into relationship with us by invitation. His transforming power will be at its greatest if we trust Him and meet Him half-way.

Even in the drama of Ezekiel’s bone-strewn valley, transformation is not the result of a unilateral surge of divine energy – first Ezekiel must prophesy to the bones, inviting the Spirit to do His work. When it comes to engaging the Holy Spirit, it takes two to tango.

Second, Jane talked to me about the teacher’s work of preparation and drew a parallel with the role of the Holy Spirit in preparing us for the trials of this life - and for the life to come, preparing us to be tested if you like.

Similarly, Simon pointed out that the role of Advocate or Counsellor is not to judge, but to prepare the litigant for judgement.

Much as we might like to push the thought away, Christ repeatedly explains to us that we shall face God’s judgment (as we discussed when we considered the parable of the Fig Tree a month or so ago). Imagine heading for a life-or-death trial at the Old Bailey but failing to prepare with the counsellor appointed to advise us, or entering court without an advocate at our side.

God, in his mercy, grants us Legal Aid. We should take it.

Third, I was struck by a story that Jenny told me:

“On one of the flights from the Falklands I was looking after two soldiers. One had been blinded, and one had a leg injury. But they had been together on the hospital ship and forged a fantastic relationship. So, on the plane we put them together. They both were helping each other through these awful circumstances. It was such a privilege to be able to help them in any way I could during the long flight home.”

What occurred to me listening to that and other moving stories from the places of extraordinary danger in which Jenny placed herself, was that a key part of her role as a comforter was to connect those in her care with each other. Similarly, Jane confirmed that wise teachers help young people to learn from one another.

This suggests to me that one of the ways that the Holy Spirit operates is by connecting us with the strength, the wisdom and the love we find in each other. Experience of the Holy Spirit can be collective, for example through making a pilgrimage as our brothers and sisters will do this week. It’s not all about me. It’s about us.

So, three points from the lovely conversations I had with my  friends, and to whom I owe, of course, a huge debt of gratitude for making this talk possible.

One: the impact of the Holy Spirit on our lives will be most effective when we actively reach out to Him. Think of Adam and God reaching towards each other on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.

Two: if we accept Him as our counsellor, advocate, and teacher, he will prepare us for the challenges of this world, and for judgement in the next – more than that he will make our case, and be with us as our advocate.

Three: building a relationship with the Holy Spirit does not have to be a solitary experience. We can find Him in each other.

And one final observation.

In talking with my friends I was struck by the joy and fulfilment brought to each of them by their vocations. They love what they do.

And I don’t think it is too fanciful to believe that the Holy Spirit, too, experiences joy as our paraclete, when we respond positively to Him. Six centuries before the birth of Christ the prophet Zephaniah proclaims that “The Lord thy God will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing”.

I believe the deep fulfilment in care-giving demonstrated by each of my correspondents reflects something divine.

This was perhaps best illustrated when Jenny spoke of caring for, of comforting, Suvana, who you may know is non-verbal. Jenny described her feelings of overwhelming joy when Suvana laughed for the first time “It sent goose bumps all through me” said Jenny. “Whenever it happens, it’s magical”.

AMEN

Sunday 23 March 2025. Third Sunday of Lent.

By David Richardson (Licensed Preacher)

Welcome to a special edition of Gardener’s Question Time. Special because our questions this week are about allegorical horticulture – specifically the parable of the fig tree which we have just heard, from Luke’s gospel.

And there are plenty of questions:
- Who or what are the fig tree, the vineyard owner and the gardener?
- How can our fig tree flourish and be fruitful?
- And finally that old Gardener’s Question Time favourite – what makes the best fertiliser?

On that last fragrant subject, I can’t resist telling a quick story. In the late 1940s US President Harry S Truman was speaking at an agricultural convention in Kansas, Mrs. Truman and a friend were in the audience. In his speech, Truman declaimed, “I grew up on a farm and one thing I know—farming means manure, manure, and more manure.” At this, Mrs. Truman’s friend whispered to her, “Bess, that’s so crude, why on earth don’t you get Harry to say fertilizer?” “Good Heaven’s,” replied Mrs. Truman, “You have no idea how many years it’s taken me to get him to say manure.”
We shall come back to the subject of fertiliser.

Last month we discussed the challenging tone of Luke’s account of the Beatitudes. That mood is sustained today, as Christ uses the Fig Tree allegory to speak of the judgement facing those who fail to repent. Mankind is the fig tree, and we shall be cut down if we fail to convert the goodness in the soil of God’s vineyard, His creation, into good fruit - of faith, hope, love and good works. Judgement lurks in the shadows of the vineyard, as it does when Christ speaks, in John’s gospel, of the True Vine - where fruitless branches are gathered up, thrown into the fire, and burned.

So how can we live a fruitful life? Well as anyone who gardens knows, success lies both in the ground conditions and in the hard work of the gardener. So let us ask ourselves: what are the right conditions for our growth as people of God; and what does the gardener, our Lord Jesus Christ, do to enable this?

In today’s gospel Christ gives us a first clear condition for fruitfulness: repentance: repentance which must stive for this Lent and always.
But how can we find the strength we need to repent; to turn to the New Life that God wants for us? Where will we find the energy for renewal and fruitful growth?

There is no further guidance in today’s passage from Luke. But I mentioned the related parable of the True Vine in the Gospel of John and there we are given a second condition for fruitfulness. “Abide in my love” says Christ “ in John 15. “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me”. The Greek word used by John that we translate as to abide is Meno, and it’s used repeatedly by John. As I looked for other uses of that word in the NT, it seemed to me that meno, abiding, is not so much about action as about a state of being. It has a stronger resonance than would be translated by words such as rest, or stay in my love. For example in Acts, Meno is used to describe ships embedded in the mud of an estuary. Meno carries with it a sense of fixity, steadfastness - of being rooted. By inviting us to abide in his love Christ is offering a still, secure centre of stability and well-being, a bed of healthy soil, from which, if we plant ourselves there, good fruits will grow. The True Vine – and the healthy fig tree should be rooted securely in this love, in a state of mindful Christian joy. Abiding joyfully in the love of Christ is the source of energy that will generate fruits of repentance, obedience and self-sacrifice.

So I suggest that as Lent continues, we focus not only on what we have chosen to forego – our acts of abstinence, and not only on what we positively do, as acts of Christian service, but on a state of being, of mindfully, prayerfully abiding in the love of Christ. For He himself tells us that by putting down abiding roots in the love of God we will flourish and produce good fruit. And what of the fertiliser mentioned in the penultimate line of today’s gospel?
I’m sure it’s a metaphor for the divine love that we have just described. But let me offer one further thought.

There is an excellent traditional fertiliser, especially good for roses, shrubs (and I suspect for fig trees) that is made from blood and bone.
And perhaps this could be a reminder to us that the enrichment of the soil in which our Christian lives can flourish and flower is made possible not by metaphysics, by an idea, or an emotion. It is made possible because we have a God who was made flesh, blood and bone, and who sacrificed His incarnate body for us. It is His blood and bone that fertilises the ground in which our souls can take root. His body and blood offered to us this very morning in the sacrament of communion. Amen

Sunday 16 February 2025. Third Sunday before Lent.

By David Richardson (Licensed Preacher)

+ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Wallace and Gromit Vengeance Most Fowl was one of the great TV hits last Christmas. And in the build up to its premier on Christmas day, the BBC aired the Aardman studio’s back-catalogue, including Nick Park’s masterpiece The Wrong Trousers. If you haven’t seen it – verily, I say unto thee, get thee unto to the iPlayer!

In the title scene from The Wrong Trousers Wallace goes through his usual early morning routine, aided by his various Heath Robinson inventions, but this time, as he is ejected from his bed he drops not into his comfortable corduroy trousers but into the iron-clad robotic legs he’s invented to take the long suffering Gromit on his daily walk – and which are now under remote control by the dastardly Feathers McGraw.

I think there ought to be a word for that sensation of expecting something familiar and comforting but suddenly experiencing the shock of the unexpected and uncomfortable. 

When I saw that I would be preaching on the Beatitudes today, I sighed a happy sigh. Aha, I thought, I can wax lyrical about the comforting poetry of the Sermon on the Mount, paint the bucolic scene, as our gentle Saviour directs us lovingly along the paths of righteousness. I might even (quite unpretentiously of course!) throw in a bit of Wordsworth.

But then I had a Wrong Trousers moment. For today’s Gospel is not Mathew’s familiar and comforting account - the one you’ll find on the Church of England Website and quoted on many a bookmark and fridge magnet. No! Today’s Gospel is Luke’s account of the Beatitudes, which has a sharper edge and is a challenging, even a disconcerting, read. 

Feeling a little shaken, I started to look at the differences between Luke’s account of the Beatitudes and Matthew’s. 

One of the first things you notice is that the physical setting seems quite different. Matthew tells us that When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and sat down with his disciples. Whereas Luke, as we’ve just heard, says that Christ  “came down with them and stood on a level place”. 

In fact, it’s almost certain that both accounts relate to the same event. The traditional site of the sermon (where, today you’ll find the Church of the Beatitudes) is on a plateau, but set among hills, with a panoramic view over Lake Galilee. So you could call this up on the mount or down on the plain. 

What we have here I think are our two Evangelists choosing to emphasise particular aspects of the scene, the geography to extract additional meaning and resonance.

Matthew shows us Christ on the mount, a place associated from the days of Moses with the revelation of God’s commandments. Luke presents Christ on the plain – a place associated in Jewish tradition with facing the realties of life – and literally with plain speaking! Luke also chooses to tell us that Christ looks up at his disciples and that “power came out from him”. There’s none of this in Mathew. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to imagine that while Christ in Mathew gazes into the middle distance, in Luke He fixes his listeners with his gaze, face-to-face, you could almost say “in their face”.

This directness is carried into the language. Matthew’s account is rich in poetic image: “Blessed are the poor in spirit…Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”. But in Luke, Christ is pointed, literal and immediate:  “Blessed are you who are poor”; “Blessed are you who are hungry now”. And He uses the second person, not “Blessed are they”, but “Blessed are you”,  directly involving and implicating you - the listener.  But perhaps the most challenging aspect of the Tough Love offered by Jesus in Luke’s account is that while in Matthew there are eight beatitudes, Luke has just four, before Christ switches from blessing to warning – “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation…Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry”.

For me, leading my cosy life in Middle England, this makes for uncomfortable reading. And that’s exactly what is intended! These are words to shake us into re-examining the values by which we live - Beatitudes to challenge our attitudes!  To reinforce this, Luke is cleverly subversive in the Greek word he uses for those who are blessed - Makarios. Originally, the blessed ones referred to as the Makarios were the Greek gods, who lived blissfully above the cares of mortals. But by the time Luke was writing, the word was being used to refer to the human social elite, the upper crust, the privileged and wealthy, whose resources and power put them above the cares and problems of ordinary folk. 

Many people in Christ’s audience would have used the word in this way. We heard, for example, that the crowd included people from Tyre and Sidon. These  were economic hubs, costal hot spots of trade and commerce, where people would have aspired to be Makarios – leading the Good Life of material prosperity. But Luke recycles and reclaims the word Makarios, to underline Christ’s reversal of this materialistic world-view, to show us what it really means to be “well-off” – to show that leading The Good Life is not the same thing as leading A Good life. 

For it is not the elite, the rich and powerful who are blessed. It is not Elon Musk and the Tech Bro’s who are leading the Good Life. Divine grace is freely offered disconnected from, and a reversal of, worldly privilege. Surely this is a message that our materially obsessed, spiritually impoverished world, needs to hear. In which case, the words in today’s Gospel are not the Wrong Trousers at all. 

And finally, one more Wallace and Gromit image. Towards the end of the Wrong Trousers our two heroes find themselves on a runaway model train, with Feathers McGraw attempting to derail them. Suddenly the train is about to run out of track, but Gromit has acquired a box of spare track. And still sitting astride the engine he lays it out with lightning speed ahead of the hurtling wheels of the locomotive, saving our heroes from disaster. 

Whenever I feel that life is careering out of control I am going try to remember that there is someone riding the train with me, someone who loves me even more than Gromit loves the undeserving Wallace, someone who is laying out the track ahead, to bring me safely home.  Amen

Sunday 26 January 2025. Conversion of Paul.

By Katherine Price (Vicar)

+ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In one of his first acts as President of the United States Donald Trump has issued a pardon for over 1500 people convicted for their involvement in the violent attack on the capitol building in January 2021. But one of those people in particular has made the headlines: A seventy-one year old woman called Pamela Hemphill. Back in 2021 she was called the ‘MAGA Granny’ and she was a hero of the Trump movement – proudly prepared to risk prison to overturn the democratic result of the presidential election. But four years later, she has publicly refused to accept a pardon saying that what she did that day was wrong, and likening her former commitment to the radical right to her experience of addiction. It is a dramatic conversion And it takes guts, To say, ‘everything I stood for, I got it wrong’.

I am reminded of her this weekend as we mark the Conversion of St Paul because Paul was an extremist – a violent extremist. He was inspired by an intense, ideological hatred of the Jesus movement. He had already been involved in the murder of one man, Stephen, and like so many angry young men he was hungry to make a name for himself. Well, he has made a name for himself! We still remember his name two thousand years later not for his violence but as the most famous example of someone who admitted he’d got it all wrong.

St Paul is of course one of our two patron saints in this church but we celebrate him particularly at Epiphany because he is the ‘apostle to the Gentiles’. It is through his preaching first of all that the message of Jesus reaches beyond the Jewish community and those associated with it. The last will be first… He often referred to himself as the last and the least of the apostles but in his own way the greatest. He – like Peter, and Andrew, and Thomas – claimed to have been called by Jesus himself but like us, he never met Jesus in the flesh loath as he always was to admit any dependence on others he first heard of Jesus through the church, through other people, Just as we do today. He is the last of the apostles and the first of the rest of us.

Whenever we talk about conversion I know that for some people there is an almost allergic reaction to the idea. Sometimes if I talk to someone about faith, they might accuse me “are you trying to convert me?” Of course, nobody can ‘convert’ another person; only God can convert the heart. But it’s interesting that people are afraid of being convinced; As though they can’t quite trust themselves to resist! And I wonder if that is what’s going on with Paul, or rather with Saul, before his conversion.

What is it in the message of Jesus that he finds so threatening? What is it that he is so afraid might turn out to be true? Saul clearly had a longing for God, a longing to serve God 100% which stayed with him all his life but I think perhaps his violent rejection of Jesus and all he stood for is something to do with a violent rejection of his own weakness, of everything he felt ashamed of in himself. We know that he wanted to be the cleverest, the most obedient, the top of the class: “I advanced beyond many of my own age” but if Jesus is right, and God loves the stupid and the wayward and the sinner and, God forbid, the Greeks and the Romans and even the Samaritans what was it all for? You can see why Saul was violently afraid of grace!

St Paul’s conversion on the Road to Damascus is the most famous conversion in history.

It’s the first of many famous conversions: The Emperor Constantine was converted on the battlefield in 312 AD. Toward the end of the same century, St Augustine’s conversion came about in a garden when he heard a child’s voice telling him to ‘pick up and read’ the Bible. But what did either of those ‘conversion moments’ mean? Constantine was still a warlike man who saw God as his ally in battle, and he didn’t get baptised until he was on his deathbed – He wanted to be sure of wiping out all his sins, and he didn’t want to give them up before he had to! Augustine was already attending baptism preparation and would call himself a Christian Before this moment but his conversion marked the start of his commitment to the celibate life – His acceptance of what God demanded of him personally. Or what of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism? He was already ordained a priest and obsessed with holiness when he had his conversion experience – feeling his heart ‘strangely warmed’.

We all have different stories of our ‘conversion’ – some sudden, some lifelong – and sometimes other people’s accounts of conversion can feel like a challenge to ours! Why was theirs so dramatic? Or why did they find it so easy? But even for Paul, the ‘Damascus road’ was only one step in the process of conversion. Although he instantly threw himself not only into baptism but into preaching, arguing as fiercely for his new belief as he had for his old, it took him fourteen years out of the public eye to truly find a mature faith that was about more than just being right and being all-in.

Perhaps that is how long it took him to accept what he later described as the strength “made perfect in weakness”. Some modern commentators have speculated that Paul suffered with some sort of neurological condition such as epilepsy which, they argue, would be consistent with the symptoms he describes of bright lights and temporary blindness. We know from Paul’s own account that he lived with chronic illness and took many years to accept that God was not going to heal him. Some see this medical interpretation as trying to ‘explain away’ Paul’s conversion, to dismiss it as a mere ‘symptom’. But you cannot explain away his decades of ministry, the churches he planted, the letters which appear in every Bible and on which scholars still produce reams of commentary every year, or his endurance of imprisonment and death, all of which depend on this moment. His faith, and his response to it, are undeniably real – What does it matter whether or not he came to that acceptance of faith through his experience of illness? Would it not be exactly like God to use our greatest weaknesses to confer his greatest gifts?

Just as conversion did not make Paul physically healthy so it didn’t take away his other faults either! Even after his Damascus road experience, Saul is still Saul – he didn’t even change his name immediately, as we often assume, and he didn’t immediately change in other ways either. Years later, boasting to the Galatians about his precocious childhood and his impressive revelations, he is still the fiercely proud, independent, difficult man he always has been – a delight to read and a nightmare to work with! And that’s exactly what the mission of God needed at this point. Only someone as fiercely independent as Paul could cope with the rootless life, constantly on the road, constantly moving on, constantly at risk of imprisonment or physical danger. Only someone as frankly arrogant as Paul could speak as boldly as he does in the name of Christ, and could provide the discipline needed in the early church communities and only someone with Paul’s awareness of his own limitations – his bodily limitations, the violence of his past, the evil of which he knows he is capable - could remain truly dependent on God in all that.

And so he is the instrument God has chosen: Just as God chose King David, musician and murderer, or any of the other flawed and faithful people who populate our bible and our calendar of saints and just as, we pray, God may still today be able to work some good through and in spite of our flawed leaders, in the church and in the world. We are called to a lifelong conversion. We do not rise from the waters of baptism as someone other than ourselves. Rather, we begin a journey towards who we really are – not to get rid of our weaknesses, our failings, our flaws, but to convert them, to change them, as swords into ploughshares, as water into wine, into an instrument of God’s purpose, a means of God’s glory. Amen.

Fourth Sunday of Advent December 2024

By David Richardson (Licensed Preacher)

For He that is mighty has magnified me.

Let me start with a warning for those highly conscious of their Body Mass Index, that the message I’m working towards today is that this Christmas, we should be willing to expand. This might appear to be in breach of NHS advice, but bear with me and I’ll try to explain…
In the first two chapters of his gospel Luke (uniquely among the Evangelists) flips the focus like a skilled film director, between two interrelated stories. The story of Mary and the birth of Christ is interwoven with that of Elizabeth and Zechariah, the parents of John the Baptist.
In today’s gospel those two storylines come together, as the newly pregnant Mary visits her older, cousin Elizabeth, who is entering the third trimester of her pregnancy.
So why does Luke tell these stories in parallel? Well, the first thing to say is that this is no accident. Luke is a sophisticated, cosmopolitan author, with a Greek literary education. He writes nothing by chance. So you may be sure that he is using this twin-track structure with purpose - to make us think.
One intention, I believe, is to give a credible context to the Nativity; to root Mary and the birth of Christ in time and place. Mary and Elizabeth are presented as real Judean women, with flesh and blood pregnancies, and relatable personal challenges – infertility for Elizabeth, and pregnancy outside of marriage for Mary. I think we see Luke’s empathy with women here - he is after all the only Gospel writer to make clear that, during his ministry, Jesus was constantly accompanied by female disciples.
So, we hear this morning that “Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country” to meet Elizabeth. I love the picture Luke gives us here, as Mary (not having the benefit of WhatsApp) hurries to take her Big News to her kith and kin in the hills. It shows us a Mary who has agency, who is active not passive, who literally has “get up and go”. And for me the story has the ring of absolute truth. This feels like the real world.
It is also a world of miraculous connection with God. Both pregnancies follow a visitation by the Angel Gabriel. And the two stories have striking similarities. But, at the same time, by setting them alongside each other Luke is provoking us to think about the binary difference between them, to see the unique cosmic significance of the child conceived by Mary.
Elizabeth’s pregnancy, late in life, is miraculous, but it is a human affair. She is to bear the last of the Old Testament prophets, the end of the Old Covenant line. John will, as Luke says, be strong in spirit. He will be, an extraordinary human being. But only that.
In the story of the younger woman, perhaps not much older than a child herself, we are witnessing the conception not of a prophet, but of the one who has been foretold by the prophets – Immanuel, the bringer of the new Covenant; God choosing to enter directly into His creation as a human being, in order to redeem it.
Even in utero, John recognises this as he leaps in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary and the unborn Jesus enter the room.
A further reason that I think Luke runs the stories in parallel, is to prefigure the fundamental Gospel message that calls upon us, his readers, to change our lives. In presenting these two children, Luke wants us to think about the men they will become: reminding us that the two children who’s birth we are witnessing will grow up to offer us the method and the means of our redemption.
Elizabeth’s child will cry out to us from the wilderness telling us what we must do to be saved, Repent and be Baptised. Mary’s child will offer us the how of our redemption, the means of salvation, because by being both God and man, and by his sacrifice on the Cross, He will connect us irrevocably and forever to the gracious love of the Father.
The ten verses that follow immediately on from those in our gospel are those that we heard as our psalm – Mary’s song, the Magnificat.
When Shakespeare wants to convey dramatic moments of emotional significance, he shifts from prose to verse. And in the same way Luke moves into a lyrical form in this wonderful song (or canticle) to convey Mary’s intense experience. For me, it is one of the most beautiful passages in scripture – gloriously preserved in Anglican liturgy when Thomas Cranmer cut and pasted it from monastic Vespers into Evening Prayer.
I want to focus on one key word, which is the word that gives the Canticle its name, traditionally translated into English as magnify. The same Greek word is used twice in the Magnificat but, I think, with a nuanced variation in sense which might allow us to unpack some additional meaning from these familiar verses.
The Greek word used twice by Luke is Megalano. And we generally interpret this as meaning to exalt, or praise. That is the sense in which it is used in the first line of the Magnificat, as Mary in her purity and humility, praises God, with her heart and soul.
A few lines later the phrase is echoed, but with the subject and object reversed. Having magnified the Lord, Mary sings (in the traditional translation we use at Evensong) “For He that is mighty hath magnified me.”
Does this simply mean that God has exalted Mary, held her up for praise? Or as in the translation we heard today that He has “done great things for” Mary, Both are of course true, She is blessed among women as the Mother of God.
But consider the root of the word Megalano, of which Luke would have been very aware, and I think we will find additional resonance.
In modern idiom we use the prefix mega to denote a million, as in Megaton, or Megahertz. But the original meaning of Megalano is to make greater, to expand, to increase.
Let us think for a moment of Mary, not in her uniqueness but in her universality as the representative of all humanity, at this turning point in human history.
In bearing the Christ child. In her obedient response to God’s call, Mary carries the humanity of us all into a new, infinitely richer, into an infinitely bigger, relationship with God.
I think that this is the transformation, the magnification, of which she sings.
Through his incarnation, Christ magnifies us all, infinitely expanding our potential. He offers all people, for all time the transformational opportunity to connect with the Father as his children, because the Son has entered this material world as our brother, even now resting in his mother’s womb, in the way of every human being since the dawn of time.
So this is Mary’s song. But it is also a song for us all. For He that is mighty has magnified you, and me.
But how to respond to this great invitation to exponential growth? Well, Mary shows us how: with gentle obedience, but also with courage, ready to embrace God’s will for us, not as mere vessels of His will, but actively grasping the opportunity He gives us to step forward into a brave new world, full of grace.
Hence my proposal that we should see Christmas as a time to expand, to grow towards that full potential for our lives that the Christ child brings us, here, now and forever; the opportunity which Mary was the first to grasp and acknowledge.
What might that mean in our lives? What opportunities might we grasp to stretch and extend ourselves through the grace of God? And how do we draw on that grace to be courageous, as Mary was, in living the life He offers us?
In the hectic festive week ahead, perhaps we might do as Mary did, treasure up these things, and ponder them in our hearts. And perhaps we might use the Magnificat as our own prayer.
AMEN

Second Sunday of Advent December 2024

By Katherine Price (Vicar)

He will refine them like gold and silver until they present offerings pleasing to the Lord.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit

Some people are really difficult to buy presents for! I mean what do you give the God who literally has everything? When we’re children, presents are the fun bit of Christmas. And maybe when we have children, it gets fun again, as long as their tastes aren’t too expensive! But as we get older, the whole gifting thing can become a bit stressful. Will they like it? Do we know each other and each other’s tastes as well as we think we do? Very often the answer is no: my sister and I are still giving each other the things we would each have liked the last time we lived together which is now about twenty years ago! So this passage from Malachi is giving us a Christmas day nightmare: Our offering to God is not “pleasing to the Lord, as in former years.” We do not know our heavenly Father as well as we think we do. He doesn’t like what we’ve got him.

In our Advent sequence, today, the second Sunday in Advent, represents the Prophets. Next Sunday we will look specifically at John the Baptist who also features today, as the culmination of that Old Testament prophetic tradition, but today is prophets and prophecy in general. And, if you recall Frances talking last week about the four ‘last things’, death, judgment, heaven and hell that makes today also the day for judgment! Those two themes go together Because the prophets of the old testament are, a lot of the time, being very judgy – telling us where we are going wrong. That’s not all they do; Today is also a day to remember the promises of God and his blessings. But a lot of prophecy is about where we are going wrong and where we will end up if we keep on in that direction.

All of our readings today reflect this theme of our imperfection and our need for change. We are reminded today that our life with God is not just about our salvation, our once-for-all redemption in Jesus Christ but also involves an ongoing process of refinement, of purifying, of repentance, of learning, of crooked ways being straightened out and rough edges knocked off. It feels right now as if everyone and everything is under judgment. Just in the last week in the news we’ve had the scandal involving Gregg Wallace, the BBC cookery presenter; and we’ve got an enquiry going on into the murders committed by the nurse Lucy Letby and how that was not spotted and stopped sooner. Over the course of 2024 every single national institution in this country - the NHS, the Post Office, the BBC, Ofsted, the Police, local government, obviously the Church of England – every one has been exposed and judged for some major failing. “There is nothing hidden that will not be brought to light” – it feels as though nobody, no organisation, nobody in a position of trust or authority has lived up to what was expected of them.

I think Christmas is also a time which shines a light into our lives and particularly into our family lives, our domestic lives. And that can be a warm cosy firelight or it can be a very uncomfortable harsh searchlight. Christmas is an intense time – we’re maybe spending more time with our family than usual, probably spending more money, maybe drinking more. And what that reveals may be something beautiful: neglected relationships being renewed and rekindled around our quirky old family Christmas traditions and new families building new traditions of their own. But this season can also bring to the surface those tensions and resentments – family feuds, fallings out, trips to A&E! And it can be a really lonely time for many people.

The light of Christmas might show up what is missing in our lives especially for those who are bereaved, or recently separated, or estranged from family. We see the contrast between the ‘perfect’ Christmas which exists in our memory or our imagination or in the supermarket Christmas adverts and the reality of our bleak midwinter.

The light of Christmas can cast a dark shadow. This is what Malachi warns us of. The God whom you seek will suddenly come into his temple – and he will come like a refining fire. The coming of Jesus at Christmas is the fulfilment of everything we have been waiting for but the power of his presence, the light of his truth shining into our fallen lives, is going to be like fire, like lye, burning away the dross and revealing who we truly are. We aren’t talking here about the kind of cleansing that involves putting on a facemask and steaming in the bath. This is more the kind where you roll up your sleeves and put on your yellow gloves and clean the oven, really scour off all the burned bits: that’s what it’s going to take to make our lives ready
to present as an offering worthy to God.

Jesus comes at Christmas as prophet, and as fulfilment of prophecy, but he comes also because prophecy has failed. God has sent messenger after messenger and the message has not got through – so in the end he comes himself, ‘not to condemn the world but to save it’: Not to tell people yet again where we’re going wrong – that never gets you very far – but to show them a different way. The incarnation is a judgment on us – because in Jesus we see what we could be, and we see how very far we have fallen short. But in the incarnation God is also doing something new, setting us an example to follow. Jesus is the Father’s gift to his people but he is also the perfect offering of humanity to the Father – the offering that we too can be part of.

I don’t know about you but I like to open my smallest present last. In this Gospel passage I really like the way these grand names are piled up –Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip, Lysanias, Annas and Caiaphas Each with their titles and honours… And the word of the Lord came to none of them, But to John son of Zechariah In the wilderness, far way from the palaces of power. The gift that God is giving The ultimate, most special gift of his own self does not come in a grand package But small and hidden in a tiny child in a manger surrounded by the animals And heralded by the voice crying out in the wilderness. After this year and all the things I’ve talked about, it is really easy to be cynical; It is easy for judgment to become a counsel of despair. We can lose sight of the magic of Christmas because we are looking at the big things – war, corruption, poverty. But we know that God has not hidden himself in the big things, But in the little things – the things sometimes too small for any but a child to see.

So this year I invite you to allow God to scour away our self-righteousness and self-delusion, our pomposity, our judgment of others, all the burned-on accretions of age and cynicism to receive with the wonder of childhood the gift of the God who comes as a little child. Amen

10 November 2024

By Katherine Price (Vicar)

Christ did not enter a mere copy of the sanctuary.

Earlier this year, we marked the eightieth anniversary of the D-Day landings.
But those landings were only the beginning of a long and often brutal operation to re-take France from the occupying Nazi forces.
In the city of St Malo – the port where today the cross-channel ferries come in to Brittany –
What we commemorate as the ‘liberation’ of the city is remembered by the Maloins as one of the darkest times in the city’s history. I was there earlier this year, and when I’m on holiday I like to read a book with some connection to the place, So I was reading ‘all the light we cannot see’ –
you might’ve seen it recently as a netflix series - and this story is set during the occupation and liberation of St Malo.

If I hadn’t read that book I would never have realised that the ancient walled town I was staying in
was almost entirely reconstructed after the war. St Malo’s citizens lost 85% of their historic city in 1944 destroyed not by the Germans but mostly by the Americans, who were coming to rescue them.
Amongst so many other things, The people of St Malo had lost their past, their physical connection to their history. Other cities were also destroyed and were rebuilt in a new way – we think in this country of Coventry, and its remarkable cathedral. But the mayor and people of St Malo chose to painstakingly rebuild the original city, using the original stones.

When we gather each year on Remembrance Sunday we are no longer sharing a personal remembrance – we cannot reminisce together about our wartime experiences as former generations might have done. We are not simply repeating or copying something from year to year. Rather, what we are doing is ‘rebuilding’, reinventing, creating from our history something which is both new and old and most importantly, which meets the needs of our present generation and our future.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus is calling his disciples… Specifically, he is calling young, working men.
When I hear, on this day, of fishermen dropping their work and going to follow and to become part of something bigger I immediately think of the many young men of Grimsby – where I used to work – a fishing port – The young men who signed up straight away at the outbreak of war in 1914 – And other young men like them across the country – Seeking adventure, sharing friendship, wanting to be part of something. Although the leaders who called them – unlike Jesus – Were all too willing to shed ‘blood that was not their own’. And I wonder what there is for those young men now? For those lads who are looking to be part of something?

Well, we’ve seen one answer to that this week in the United States of America: Donald Trump won a majority across the board but he was particularly popular with young, working class men. People like Andrew and Simon-Peter, and James, and John, in Smallsville Gallilee, who wanted something more from their lives than catching fish for the next thirty years – or in Peter’s case mostly failing to catch fish! That may be kind of a horrifying thought but maybe it’s also kind of a hopeful thought. People still want to belong. People still want to follow someone who seems to have something better to offer them. It’s just that most of those who invite us to follow them are not very much like Jesus.

Jesus gave one condition for following him: Repent and believe the good news. In other words, we can rebuild a better future but only by dealing honestly with the past and having hope for the future. Making peace with one another, and making peace with our past is so often about how we choose to remember and what we choose to forget. November is a season of remembrance in the UK; as well as Remembrance Sunday today and Armistice Day tomorrow, we had all saints and all souls earlier in the month, and last week we ‘remember remembered’ the fifth of November Gunpowder treason and plot!

But do we commemorate it as the survival of our parliament and our constitutional monarchy against terrorism? Or do we risk reopening old wounds and the uncomfortable legacy of anti-catholic persecution in this country? I often think about the way we talk about things being ‘catholic’ or ‘protestant’ in this church, and are we careful enough about that history of religious division and persecution?

Or is the fifth of November now just “firework night” –we remember the date but forget the meaning
and just enjoy the fireworks together? Is the ‘forgetting’ part of the healing? I spent Monday evening at an ecumenical celebration in London – we were celebrating friendship between Anglicans and Methodists – there were Roman Catholics there as well – we shouldn’t underestimate just how extraordinary it is that we have got where we are today from where we have been at times in the past.

Today for the the first time the Remembrance Sunday service in Belfast will be attended by a politician from Sinn Feinn, the Northern Irish First Minister. That is a really powerful illustration that remembrance is not just about the past; it is not just something we replay or repeat or re-enact year on year. It is an invitation to build something new If we can repent and believe in good news.

Amen.