Talks, Sermons and Reflections

Mark 16:1-8 I wrote to Mike to let him know what I was thinking of saying: that the resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate happy ending. This is the fairy tale on which all fairy tales are based. Jesus is the knight who turns the scullery maid into a princess, who rescues the princess shut up in a tower, who wakes her with a kiss. And Jesus is the princess who saves the prince, enchanted by a wicked witch, from their life as a beast or a bear or a frog. And here is a story in which they do all ultimately live ‘happily ever after’. And it is a story that is based on a historical fact – the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. It is a great idea, nicked in my case from Tim Keller who, I believe, stole it from CS Lewis. But Mike pointed out to me that Mark 16 doesn’t end with the ‘happily ever after’. It ends with some serious confused, scared and silent women. It is a very odd ending, and the reason that we ended there is because most people think that Mark ende...

John 3.14-21 John 3.16 is probably the most famous verse in the Bible.    “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him, should not perish but have eternal life”. If you only ever learn one verse by heart from the Bible, then apart from the Lord’s Prayer, this is that verse Billy Graham, whose funeral was a week ago, and who was one of the most influential Christian evangelists and preachers of the C20th (he even preached here in Moscow in Soviet as well as post-Soviet times) used to quote John 3.16 when asked to do a sound check before speaking. He said that even if the sound operator was too busy to listen to what he had to say during the actual event, if he heard John 3.16 then he will have heard the gospel: the good news about Jesus. For God There are a few people who would claim to be out and out atheists, and a few more who would claim to be agnostics, but most people are aware that there is something or ...

The Anglican Church has about 85 million members in 39 Provinces across 165 countries. The average Anglican, as the current Archbishop of Canterbury often says, is not someone from the UK, but a 30-year-old woman in Africa who is earning under $1 a day. It is a family of Churches, a fellowship or communion of Churches, which grew out of the Church of England, with shared saints, linked histories, theology, worship and a shared relationship to the Archbishop of Canterbury. So what is Anglicanism? What does it mean to be an Anglican? BEING PART OF THE ONE CATHOLIC CHURCH There is a continuity with the past A maintenance of the three-fold order of bishops, priests and deacons. An unbroken link through time and space with the apostles, and a very early ordering of the Church. Confession of the historic creeds: Apostles, Nicene and Athanasian Celebration of the sacraments: and particularly Baptism and Holy Communion Use of liturgy, rites and prayers which reach back to the...