Hark, the glad sound - the Saviour comes!

This sermon was preached at Lincoln Cathedral on Sunday 19th November 2017, using the lectionary readings for the day with a particular focus on  Matthew 25: 14-30 , the Parable of the Talents - a parable that ends with a note of judgment and condemnation. The other readings ( Zephaniah 1: 7, 12-18,  1 Thessalonians 5: 1-11 ) were also what might be characterised as a bit depressing. So I thought I'd begin where I was and where I suspected a lot of the congregation might be... This parable is pretty near the bottom of my wish list of passages to preach on. I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea of judgment; the unfairness of the set up; the perfectly reasonable behaviour that gets the poor third bloke cast out. And that’s leaving aside the notion of slavery that underpins the whole parable. But that’s the way the church’s cycle of readings works – it confronts us with the uncomfortable parts of the Bible. And the point of the sermon is to make us face up to them....

This sermon was preached at St John the Baptist, Ermine. I spent a long time trying to find the right angle for this, and eventually decided to play with the idea of the letter - not just to preach on Thessalonians, but to see how the church would react to the idea of receiving their own letter from Paul. I did a bit of business at the beginning with finding the letter, opening the envelope, seeing who it was from, asking if I should read it - just for setting the scene and getting people interested. This was also the Sunday that the long-serving Vicar announced his retirement, so I wanted a sermon that said something about who the community was and would remain; that suggested that change was not necessarily destructive; and that would stay with them into the announcement to offer some hope.  In retrospect, there are things I'd do differently, but I was pleased with the concept of the letter-from-Paul. I probably can't do it again in the same community though! It might...

Harvest time is a pretty important time in the church's year - like Remembrance and Christmas, it's a point at which lots of people who rarely attend church find themselves coming to services (especially if they are part of schools or uniformed organisations) and so, as with Remembrance and Christmas, the challenge is to find ways of relating the Gospel and Christian tradition to the secular understanding of this time of year.  I think Harvest is a particularly interesting example because it is such a secular festival - i.e. not one rooted in the Christian liturgical year - and yet it is really only celebrated in churches. There is no suite of Harvest-themed merchandise in the Tesco Seasonal aisle, unlike Hallowe'en or Christmas, but equally, Harvest celebrations tend to be quite thin theologically. So I was excited to be able to engage with three Harvest readings for the Cathedral sermon. There are many other ways to take Harvest (and I took it another way in the Messy...