Latest Sermons

Each year on New Year’s Eve I gather round the dinner table with family and friends and we give each other time and space to remember and describe the best day of the year just gone. It’s not always the happiest or the most memorable, but often the day that just had everything – that summed up the previous twelve months.

Good Friday reflections on Jesus’ seven last sayings from the cross

Twenty-five years ago this week a plane carrying the Rwandan president was shot down on its descent into Kigali. In the hundred days that followed, soldiers and militias slaughtered an estimated 800,000 people

I once was invited to address an annual meeting of a regional religious society. That meant before I got up to speak there was half an hour of the legal business of the organisation to sit through. The chair received the secretary’s report; and once it had been digested, the chair said, ‘I need to tell you that our secretary has decided that it is time to stand down, and that, after 8 years of loyal service, we shall be needing to look for a successor. Are there any nominations?’ There were none.

The Slovaks have just elected a president with no political experience. The Ukrainians look like they’re about to. America did so recently; so did the French.
It’s quite normal for interviewers to expect that we have experience as well as skills and good character to be eligible for a job. But experience isn’t always a perfect preparation

Mum’s are not always easy. I know that. But they are still your mum. Sometimes they say or do terrible things mums do, stuff that other people could never say or think of saying. But they are still your mum.  And of one thing I am certain, that none of us would be here in this church without them. And children are not easy either. Think of the problems Jesus caused Mary.

Anne would be the last person to want me to waste time today talking about her. She wasn’t an argumentative person, but she had a way of speaking that gave you the impression that she’d pronounced the last word on the subject.

On Monday the President of Mexico said, ‘I have sent a letter to the king of Spain and another to the Pope … urging them to apologise to the indigenous peoples for the violations of what we now call their human rights.’ He said there couldn’t be reconciliation until there was forgiveness.

I’ve never had a conversion experience, but the closest I’ve come was in a rather dingy classroom in East London just over a decade ago.  More than a year into my ordination training, I still had no real idea why I was doing it – apart from the fact that all the people who could have prevented it, hadn’t.