Hark, the glad sound - the Saviour comes!

(an old sermon, preached at St John the Baptist, Ermine on  2 6/05/16) When I celebrated my first Eucharist, I looked down at my hands. I couldn’t believe that my human hands – even blessed, even set apart, even still smelling of chrism – could be used by God to make Godself present. How could God entrust Godself into my hands – my sinful, human hands? And more and more, as I’ve been celebrating, I’ve been thinking about the Eucharist as God making Godself completely vulnerable. Those of you who heard my Easter sermons will have heard my image of God as a baker – baking bread which will be taken and ripped apart. Bread which is ripped apart on Maundy Thursday – bread which is the body of Christ, ripped apart on Good Friday on the cross. That’s what Jesus’ words at the Last Supper tell his friends: this bread is my body. This wine is my blood. I am broken; I am poured out for you. So the breaking of the body of Jesus on the cross is made present, made real for us in...

This is an old sermon from several years ago, but I've revisited it thanks to the lectionary sending us into Joshua at Mattins and some Twitter conversations.  Somebody once said “the optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true.” People often try to divide themselves into optimists and pessimists – and I think the three readings we had today might be one of the things that optimists and pessimists hear differently. So I wonder what you heard in those readings – were you an optimist or a pessimist? did you hear about sin or about redemption? When I read the readings first, I was a pessimist – all I could hear was sin and despair. But we know that sin is never the end of the story – God will never abandon us to despair. And these readings are also full of hope. Even from the very beginning of the Genesis reading – from the first moment after sin has entered the world – God is still there. God knows what has happene...

Yesterday was the Jazz Mass at Lincoln Cathedral - as part of the Lincolnshire Jazz Week, we invited a quartet who were playing various concerts during the week to accompany our worship. We had Bob Chilcott's A Little Jazz Mass, we had songs rather than hymns and finished up with singing O I Wish I Knew How it would Feel to be Free. And in his wisdom, the Chancellor thought I could cope with preaching. Obviously, it had to be on the theme of jazz. Various people, including Richard Holloway, have written on jazz theology or jazz and theology - usually with some link between improvisation and ethics. I wanted to do something slightly different - something that worked with the readings, with their Eastertide emphasis on love and on the early Church in Acts. And my husband wisely suggested that if I was thinking about love, there was a pretty important jazz album that I might do well to listen to. So this is what I preached. Acts 10:44-end 1 John 5: 1-6 John 15: 9-17 In...