Hark, the glad sound - the Saviour comes!

a sermon  preached at Christ Church for College Communion on 14/10/2018. Trinity 20 Hebrews 4: 12-end Mark 10: 17-31 +May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our Strength and our Salvation. Today is a very exciting day. In a few hours, in Rome, Oscar Romero will be canonised – made a saint. (The question of how one makes a saint is one for another day!) Oscar Romero was the RC Archbishop of San Salvador in the late 1970s, until his death in 1980. As Archbishop, he spoke out in an increasingly corrupt society against social injustice, against poverty and exploitation, against a government that ruled by fear, torturing and assassinating their political opponents. And he died by assassination, shot as he celebrated Eucharist, by a government that was frightened by the truth he spoke. Oscar Romero was one of the major figures in liberation theology, the Catholic theology that grew up in the secon...

A sermon for Epiphany 4, preached at College Communion at Christ Church on Sunday 27th January 2019. Epiphany 4 Nehemiah 8: 1-3, 5-6, 8-10 Luke 4: 14-21 If you had the chance to be present at one event in the life of Jesus – to witness one moment from the gospels – what is the moment you would choose to see? Perhaps the birth of Jesus? Or the feeding of the five thousand? The Sermon on the Mount? The crucifixion? The Resurrection? The Last Supper? We’re unlikely to get our wish. But the moment we would choose has something to do with what we think about Jesus – what is most important for us about his message, his life, his identity. And there’s no wrong answer! Everything about Jesus is important. Everything the gospel writers wrote down was something they judged important enough to remember, and to teach new Christians about – communicating something important about who Jesus was. The Gospel stories are moments, incidents where Jesus, his identity...

A sermon preached at Keble College, as guest preacher for the evening Eucharist, 20/01/2019. I don't usually start sermons with jokes, but after the way this one was received, I see why people do! Epiphany 3 Isaiah 62: 1-5 1 Corinthians 12: 1-11 John 2: 1-11 +May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our Strength and our Salvation. As part of my role at Christ Church, I’m chaplain to the cathedral school where the choristers, as well as about a hundred other boys, go; and every week I take an assembly for the Pre-Prep boys. And this week I told them the story we’ve just heard. On reflection, 4 to 7 year olds may be the wrong audience for a story that is essentially about how very nice a good bottle (or three) of wine is. It certainly seemed that way when one boy stuck his hand up and told me his dad had drunk a whole bottle of wine the night before. At this point I tried to catch the teacher’s eye ...