Candlemass

Our daughter adopted a cat a few months ago. She (the cat, not the daughter) had been badly treated, was very much undernourished and fearful, and...

"...Never Shall Be Slaves"?

Every year on the last night of the Proms, the audience enthusiastically engages with the fantasy that ‘Britons never never never shall be...

The Other Side of the Mirror

A friend alerted me recently to the Facebook page of a church in the south of England, where a sermon was quoted approvingly. His reaction and mine...

Building Bigger Barns?

A couple of weeks ago we had in the gospel Jesus’s friend Mary, who he praised for her other-worldliness, for focusing on his teaching and by...

Shepherd in the Echo Chamber

If you spend any time at all on social media you can’t fail to be aware of the dangers. The dangers of living in a sort of echo-chamber, and only...

Easter Message 2019

People who make banners for churches need to be very careful. There is one in a certain retreat house that says ‘Come apart’ . It means of course...

Lent: transforming our wilderness into a desert

Romans 10.8b-13 ‘The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart’ (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because if you confess with...

phishing for men?

4th Sunday before Lent 10-02-19 Isaiah 6.1-8 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem...

Baptism of Christ

Sermon for the Feast of the Baptism of Christ: 13-01-2019 Isaiah 43: 1-7; Luke 3: 17-17, 21, 22I There is a frightening rise in violence...

A New Branch (Advent Sunday)

Jeremiah 33.14-16 Luke 21.25-36 Didn’t you feel, if you stepped out of this tent just before, that winter has well and truly begun? It might be...

The Mersey Beatitudes #8 :: The way things are going, they're gonna crucify me (The Persecuted)

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a very shy clergyman. So shy that he spent most of his life as a lecturer in Mathematics at Oxford and hardly ever,...

The Mersey Beatitudes #2 :: Take a Sad Song & Make it Better (mournfulness)

Pete put a picture in his weekly email of one of my favourite fictional characters: Eeyore the old grey donkey. There’s something about him which...