Talks, Sermons and Reflections

Luke 14.7-14 This is not just a passage offering advice about weddings and dinner parties. The audio of this talk can be found here It is good advice - which I spectacularly ignored at a major civic function at Bury St Edmunds when I was there. As vicar of the civic church, I expected to be on one of the higher tables. I waltzed in with someone and walked up to one of the higher tables, not the highest – I knew I wasn’t on that – but my name wasn’t there. So, I then had to casually walk past the other tables pretending that I wasn’t looking at the names, until I reached the table where my name appeared.   It would have been so much less humiliating if I had started at the bottom and worked my way up! Peter Bruegel the elder. A Peasant wedding This story that Jesus tells is an illustration of one of the old Proverbs of Isael. “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great; for it is better to be told, ‘Come up here’, than to be put lower i...

Isaiah 6:1-8 Trinity 2024 The Trinity is not a problem to be solved, but a relationship to be encountered. A link to the audio of this talk can be found here There is a great clip from the film, Nuns on the Run where the two characters Brian and Charlie are hiding from gangsters dressed as nuns. Brian has to teach a class about the Trinity Brian: Explain the Trinity. Charlie: Hmm, well it’s a bit of a mystery. You’ve got the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. But the three are one---like a shamrock, my old priest used to say. Three leaves but one leaf. Now the Father sent down the Son, who was love, and then when he went away he sent down the Holy Spirit, who came down in the form of a…. Brian: You already told me—a ghost. Charlie: No, a dove. Brian: The dove was a ghost? Charlie: No, the ghost was a dove. Brian: Let me try and summarise this. God is his son. And his son is God. But his son moonlights as a holy ghost, a holy spirit and a dove. And they all send each other, even though...

Matthew 28.1-10 This morning we are looking at Matthew 28, and the account of the resurrection of Jesus Matthew specifically mentions two women who come to the tomb, and he names them: Mary Magdalene and ‘the other’ Mary (not Mary the mother of Jesus, but Mary the mother of James and Joseph). The audio of this sermon can be found here That is very Matthew: Matthew likes his ‘twos’. He mentions two blind men who Jesus heals (twice); he mentions two demoniacs from whom Jesus casts out demons. And now he mentions two women who come to the tomb. And the reason is that you need two witnesses in a Jewish court if your evidence is to be counted as valid So Matthew is putting forward Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. They are his witnesses However, there were other women who came with them to the tomb. Mark mentions Salome; Luke mentions Joanna and ‘other women’ And so in our icon (a 16 th Century icon from the Pskov region), I think you can count 5 women looking down at the tomb...

2 Corinthians 8.8-15 We are thinking over these three weeks before Lent about giving, and we are looking at verses from Paul’s letter to the Christians in the city of Corinth. Today we are looking at the reason for giving. A link to the audio of the sermon And it is very simple. It can be summed up in one word: LOVE We give to what we love, we give because we love. And it works the other way round If you want to know what you love, then look at what you spend your surplus money on – the money that is over and above our essential needs, the essential needs of those for whom we are responsible, and the things that we required to pay, like taxes. (By the way, paying taxes is not only a legal duty, but a spiritual duty. Jesus tells us to pay our taxes). But after that, how do we spend our money? Is it a bigger or more modern flat, clothes, technology, restaurants, gaming, savings, investment, entertainment, travel, holidays? We spend our surplus money on what we love That is what Jesus sa...

2 Corinthians 8:1-7 Today we start a series of three talks on giving The heart of giving The reason for giving The blessing of giving They are based on 2 chapters in 2 Corinthians, a letter sent by Paul to the Christians in the city of Corinth in which he talks about a collection that the church in Corinth planned to make to support the Christians in Jerusalem and Judaea, because they were facing a famine. And in our reading today, Paul urges the Corinthian Christians to complete what they said they would do. That is important. It is easy to make a promise, especially if it is about money, and then – if not deliberately break our promise – forget our promise. I wonder how many of us have done that! Well, Paul encourages them not forget their promise and to do what they said that they would do. And in these verses, he tells them about the Macedonian Churches (Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea). He says that, although they were extremely poor, and even though they had suffered d...

John 11.28-44 ‘Jesus began to weep’ John 11:35 In the KJV it is just two words ‘Jesus wept’, making it the shortest verse in the bible. Why? Why does he weep? Jesus is clearly not weeping for Lazarus, because he knows that in a few minutes he will raise Lazarus from the dead And Jesus is not weeping for Mary and Martha and the mourners in their grief, because he knows that in a few minutes he will turn that grief into joy If a child comes to you all upset because something has been taken away from them, but you can give them something so much better, then you may feel for them, but rather than weep with them you will wipe their eyes and make them happy again. So why does Jesus weep? 1. Jesus weeps in compassion because he sees what death does He sees the devastation that it causes. Death was never part of God’s plan When God created the world there was no death. At the heart of the garden of Eden there was the tree of life. Death is nothing in itself. It is simply a negation of what i...

John 17:6-19 Today we look at Jesus’ prayer for his disciples. It is important This is the prayer that Jesus prays for us as he goes to the cross This is the prayer that Jesus prays for us in heaven It is a prayer for all those who the Father has given him, for all those who come to him. This is a prayer for believers. “I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours” (v9) Four things that he asks for: unity, joy, protection, holiness 1. Unity: ‘So that they may be one as we are one’ (v11) This is the prayer that believers will be united. Not united physically, but at a deeper level He prays that we might be one as the Father and the Son are one. The Father and the Son are like this: When one is glorified, the other is glorified. At the beginning of this prayer, Jesus prays, “Glorify the Son so that the Son may glorify you” And we see throughout Jesus’ life his dependency on the Father. He shares the life of the Father and th...

Ezekiel 36.24-28 Great to be together at this joint service God has a restoration programme! Not a building – more personal and more cosmic.   He wishes to restore humanity – so that we become the people who he made us to be - and, through us, restore creation so that creation is as it was supposed to be. God is in the business of making a new people. That is what Ezekiel 36.24-28 is all about 1.       He gathers us. God speaks through Ezekiel to his people and says ‘I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land’ (v24) He is speaking to Israel, to his people in the Old Testament. They have been scattered. They had been exiled to the North and East, Babylon, and to the South and West, Egypt. And this verse was fulfilled when the Jews returned from exile to the land of Israel. But that was just a small preview, a taster, of what God is going to do. When he send...