preaching

Lately I have posted in WordPress. Here is the opening from the latest sermon.

Imagine the scene, everyone in Slimbridge is down by the roundabout. They are agitated and there is murmuring – they want the clerk in orders to read out the Ten Commandments, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the historic Creeds.

Well, if you can’t imagine that, let’s think about our reading from the prophet this morning.

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Other sermons are available

Since arriving in Slimbridge, I have been saving my sermons and producing them on my website. A number of different ways of presenting them have happened. Here is a listing of the earlier sermons.

Sermons before using WordPress

Some sermons

Here are the openings for some sermons as they are being kept on these pages.

Epiphany 2

“Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says ‘Let Jesus be cursed!’…”

I wonder whether this verse is actually the shortest of commentaries on the OT book of Job. Because, if we remember correctly, Job is having a lot of trouble and is constantly asking, “Why, O Lord?” as he loses friends and riches, his family and even his health. However, in his isolation Job keeps faith – he never curses God for his tribulations. He may condemn the day of his birth, but all he curses is his human experience, never the divine.

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Epiphany

Creator of the heavens, who led the Magi by a star to worship the Christ–child: guide and sustain us, that we may find our journey’s end in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We are celebrating The Epiphany today and this prayer encapsulates the significance of this event in the life of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Let’s see it the way our contemporaries might look at it.

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Second Sunday of Advent

We read these verses in the gospel today.

‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord,…”’

We all know about this quotation from Isaiah used in the gospel, don’t we? We have heard it every year at Advent for all the time we have been christians. That lone voice is declaring that the way of the Lord must be prepared. That voice crying is John’s voice, isn’t it?

However, I want to take a step back, because we english-speaking christians have been reading this quoted Old Testament verse incorrectly. A Jewish friend pointed out that the voice is crying that “the way of the Lord is to be prepared in the wilderness”. That is how the Hebrew scriptures preserve Isaiah’s words. That is quite different to the quotation as used in Luke.

How has this happened? To understand this we have to look at the artefacts of the ancient world to understand this. …

Third Sunday Before Advent

Can you imagine Ninevah – a city so large that if you were to walk from one end to the other, it would take you three days to make that journey? I suppose London and its environs would rival that great city of the ancient world in every way.

We can imagine the goings on in Ninevah because we can see the same sorts of things happening in London today. Is God wroth because of what is happening today, just as God was incensed with the citizens of Ninevah so long ago? Certainly we are upset with all the evil we see today, from the mild forms of rude behaviours like swearing at the innocent, which we have seen and perhaps experienced, to the reprehensible acts of knife crime and even murder reported on the news daily.

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