Showing everything tagged as Sermon

Two weeks ago I sat in the deanery garden of St Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg, with Godfrey Harwood, who was dean from 1986, during the transfer of power, and who had become a close friend of Geoffrey Brown, vicar of St Martin’s during the same period.

At Open House London last weekend I ended the church tour in the Dick Sheppard Chapel downstairs.  The last thing I showed our many visitors was the wonderful St John’s Bible, this volume of the Gospels that we read from here every week.

In the first of our Autumn Lecture Series last Monday Rowan Williams spoke about what it means to encounter the other. He spoke with a simplicity that made one feel that he was articulating a truth you had always known, but I am still unpacking some of the things he said for like all real wisdom what seems at first simple has a huge resonance and depth of truth for the whole of one’s life.

Last week in the US Open tennis championship, the Australian Nick Kyrgios, at that point a set and 0-3 down, let a couple of serves pass him without attempting to play them. The hugely experienced and respected umpire Mohamed Lahyani, wondering whether the player was having a physical spasm or a mental meltdown, got down from his chair and said to him, ‘You’re great for tennis. But this isn’t good. It’s not you.’

Today’s Gospel reading seems, almost eerily, like a text specifically written for our troubled world. A text about outward virtue and inward corruption.  A text that shows it’s not what’s on the outside and goes in that is sinful; but what’s inside us that comes out.