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...

This was my sermon for Lent 2 - but although it's a Lent sermon (and a very Lent sermon in some ways) it's not one that should stay in Lent. And the last couple of weeks - Windrush, anti-immigration rhetoric - seem to have some resonance with the "othering" I was subtly challenging here. What do you want in a Saviour? What does your Saviour want of you? Sermon preached at St John the Baptist, Lent 2 25/2/18 Gen 17: 1-7, 15-1 6,  Romans 4: 18-25,  Mark 8: 31-35 What do you want in a Saviour? Imagine you’re living in a world which is bleak. You can never be sure you’ll make enough money to feed your family. There’s no welfare safety net. No NHS. No food banks. And decades ago, your country was invaded. The government gave in. And ever since, you’ve been an occupied nation. People in uniforms speaking a different language, far better off than you, lounging around barking orders at you and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. What would y...

Shalom... and Syria? Sermon preached at Lincoln Cathedral, Easter 3 15/04/18 Acts 3: 12-19 1 John 3: 1-7 Luke 24: 3 6-48 Jesus stood among his disciples and said: Peace be with you. It’s a greeting that the risen Jesus uses frequently and it’s a greeting that we, his followers, take over in our liturgy. Bishops use it exclusively – they never say “The Lord be with you,” the normal Christian greeting, but always “peace be with you.” The Subdean will use it later this morning: as we finish our focus on Jesus revealed in the words of Scripture, he will use Jesus’ words to invite us to greet him revealed in the faces of our brothers and sisters. Peace be with you. And like most of the phrases we use very often, we don’t always think about what it means. The word “peace,” for example. It’s a cliché to point out that the Greek and Hebrew concept of “peace” was much richer and fuller than the war-versus-peace dualism we associate with the word, but it’s a c...

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...

The week before Epiphany, my colleague preached a very hard-hitting New Year sermon about Bonhoeffer and the cost of discipleship. When I came to meditate on my Epiphany readings for this sermon, Bonhoeffer was echoing around my mind - not just Bonhoeffer on discipleship but the later Bonhoeffer in the prison letters, with his emphasis on God pushed out of the world onto the cross, on recognising the world as it really is. This led me to Hannah Arendt's "dark times". So I was approaching the Epiphany readings with a sense of Jesus being born into dark times; Jesus revealed as God with us in dark times. Can that be brought out in an Epiphany sermon? I did my best... What are the key parts of the Christmas story? I expect most of you would say: the stable, the shepherds, the angels; Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem (not forgetting the donkey!) and baby Jesus, asleep in a manger because there was no room in the inn. And that is indeed the Christmas story (ap...