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...

Sermon preached at Lincoln Cathedral, Candlemas 04/02/18 Micah 3: 1-5 Hebrews 2: 14-end Luke 2: 22-40 +May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our salvation. Picture the scene when Mary, Joseph and Jesus arrive at the Temple. To start with, it’s impressive. Like the cathedral, it’s up on a hill – the Temple Mount. And it was a huge building. You could see it for miles. It was new, as well – in fact, it was still being finished. So when Mary and Joseph went in, it would have given them the same feelings of awe and wonder that visitors to the cathedral experience – perhaps more. There were no other buildings of the same scale as the Jerusalem Temple in the country. The Temple was constructed as a series of courtyards. First you entered the Court of the Gentiles, and from there you went into the Court of the Women. Next was the Court of the Israelites, then the Court of the Priests. Fi...