Sermons 2025

Trinity XV, Sunday 28th September

by Fr Jack

Jeremiah 32. 1-3a, 6-15

1 Timothy 6. 6-19

St Luke 16. 19-31

‘I could have danced in front of you in a pink tutu’, says Abraham - well, sort of - today, ‘and you still wouldn’t have understood’.

Look again at this Gospel passage.

Jesus’ parable is necessarily black and white - that’s how it works as an illustration. It isn’t a fully worked out theology of how this life and the afterlife interact. It’s not pretending to be, it is one parable. But we can’t ignore its potency. 

The judgement is real. 

The responsibility is real. 

The call on our lives is real.

That is the first thing to say. 

The second is like, namely this: All those things are as real as God’s mercy, and God’s infinite love. 

In philosophical terms, God is what is called a ‘simple being’. Not simple as in un-mysterious; that would be nonsense, obviously. But ‘simple’ as in, God does not have sides or moods or phases. God is complete, eternal and perfect. In classical theology, people like St Augustine (the great North African saintly bishop and theologian) want us to understand that God’s wrath is identical to God’s love. God’s judgment is God’s mercy. They are all one. 

That should both pull us up sharp, and fill us with immense hope and gratitude. 

So, back to Dives (which means the ‘rich man’ in Latin) and Lazarus 

We are called not just to rely on God’s mercy for ourselves on that awe-filled day. But also to show it to others in the meantime! Our behaviour matters. Our choices are powerful.

When I meet God on the last day, face to face, when I see LOVE, pure Love Himself, face to face, I do not expect it to be an easy experience, but a glorious and wonderful one. 

And I half expect Jesus to look like every beggar I have walked past in the street, every person I have neglected or harmed, gossiped about, our thought less of.

And certainly, all the securities and social mores I cling to in this life, won’t be of much use to me then. 

St Paul the Apostle, writing to the Early Church Bishop St Timothy hits the nail on the head today: 

17   As for those who in the present age are rich [as, by every measure across the human average in the world today, I certainly am], command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.

 18  They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share,

 19  thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.

Deep down we know this. So why do we live as if it weren’t the case in so many ways? 

St Paul writes of contentment. We have been programmed very successfully to always want more. More choice. More stuff. More this, more that. More him or her. More immediacy, more so-called convenience. But all that is not really for our good, it is usually for the good of those who have so successfully trained us, like pets, to desire in the ways we do. This is especially so in the years since the end of WW2, and the rise of a mass-produced, advertising-based, global, consumer economy.  

Admittedly, a situation that has been coupled with wonderful stability, peace, and prosperity, advances in health and education; so much good. But for all our progress, Dives and Lazarus persist.

There are clear links here with what popped out of last week’s readings, and that sermon is on the website, so I won’t preach it again. 

Instead I want to notice questions of desire and trust leaping out of the readings given for today. 

The Gospel and St Paul to St Timothy speak clearly and plainly. Take the Sunday sheet home, and as well as putting the notices in your diary or on the calendar in the kitchen, meditate on today’s readings across the week.

Including Jeremiah, to whom we will turn now.

The Jews in Jerusalem are under siege by the Babylonians in the tenth year of King Zedekiah. They are about to lose not only their capital city, their homes and businesses, but also the Temple itself. Their everything: the place of God on Earth, their connection and atonement. 

And God, through the prophet, tells them nonetheless to buy land for houses and fields and vineyards where they are. It is an extraordinary promise, a radical hope. It will all go wrong, the exile really will be the ‘end of the world’ in so many ways for them; but build, build because God is faithful, and this will not be the end. 

An amazing statement of where we put our trust. Not in riches or might, but in God’s faithfulness.

Trust, that is.

Not optimism, or ostriches with heads in the sand - but trust.

Not ignorance of our situation, but knowledge of the One with whom we are in this situation. 

Not knowing that everything will be as we want it, but knowing that nothing can separate us from the love of God, (as St Paul writes to the Romans, and we hear at the start of the funeral service): 

‘Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

And that is the only thing that truly matters. ‘That really is life’ as St Paul says today. 

And this consideration of trust leads us briefly on to desire. Very clever people, who are very good at their jobs, have trained our desires for decades. Usually for their good, and not necessarily ours. 

We are invited to do a little of this ourselves I response. To train our trust and our desire in healthy and good Gospel-shaped ways. Habits built on the wisdom of scripture, formed of the grace of the Sacraments, a trellis that supports us in prayerfully living the promises of our baptism, and the hope and trust that helps us to ‘take hold of the life that really is life’, as St Paul tells us today. Holy habits of Sacrament, Scripture and prayer. Holy belonging here in church and in other supportive relationships. There are so many ways to gently but firmly cultivate the habit of desiring and trusting into real life, not a million shiny plastic alternatives that are waved in front of us every day saying ‘desire me!’ Trust in me!’

‘Thus [as today’s epistle says] storing up for themselves [and those around us] the treasure of a good foundation for the future’.

What has arisen from today’s readings? Our choices matter. And God’s mercy and love are endless. God’s plan for us is good. Build well, and generously. Trust and desire in life-giving ways. 

I’ll end with well-worn, but no less wonderful, words from St Augustine: 

‘Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised… we, being a part of Thy creation, desire to praise Thee, we, who bear about with us our mortality, the witness of our sin… yet … Thou movest us to delight in praising Thee; for Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee’

St Matthew’s Day, Sunday 21st September

by Fr Jack

Proverbs 3. 13-18

2 Corinthians 4. 1-6

St Matthew 9. 9-13

Reverend Lucy and I were speaking with someone this week, and we were asked how political our preaching is. It was amidst a conversation about the state of things today in politics and public life. 

    The lurch to the extreme in politics and society. 110,000 people marching in London last weekend. The decay of hitherto mainstream parties. 

I answered that I don’t preach on politics. I don’t preach on the news. Almost never. With ten minutes in a Sunday morning sermon, the most urgent thing to be done is to dig around in the readings for today, and to see what God is saying to us. 

And I said that I hope this gives people the theology which is the raw ingredients of their politics. I’m not going to preach a politics at you. Instead, I hope our preaching gives you the theological raw ingredients to do politics (and everything else) well. 

Because our theology, our relationship with God, is not like a quirky old sports car we only take out on Sundays for a drive in the country, but the rest of the week is locked in the garage, not really useful for anything. No, our relationship with God, our theological way of being, is the ground of our whole being. It is who we are as we open our eyes in the morning, as we work, and love, and exist in relationship with friend and stranger. If we act as if God isn’t there, in any aspect of our lives, then we are living a lie. 

I know how many of the people here this morning live from their faith beautifully - at work, home, the community, in so many ways. In this time of divisiveness and insecurity in public discourse, of people lurching to the extremes to find what feels like solid ground (even though it is nothing of the sort), we need to be renewed in our foundations and commitment. 

    We also need to be reminded that Jesus is always leading us on, and that we are never the finished article ourselves. Our views, our work, our way of being, cannot become too comfortable, or closed off by self-satisfaction, but must always be open to God’s Spirit and to growth. 

It is to that Holy Spirit, under her name Wisdom, that the Book of Proverbs takes us this morning. More precious than jewels. Peace, prosperity: all these things are the gifts of wisdom. 

It seems so often our society, here in the City and at large, has made wisdom (like faith, as I have said) a nice trinket, a toothless luxury, for some. But what really matters is the bottom line or power or measurable results. Wealth, brute strength and cunning seem to hold sway in so many things. Wisdom? Truth? How quaint.

Not so, says the ancient wisdom of Proverbs. What do we truly value? 

How does the way we live together reveal what we truly value? 

A wisdom revolution is what we’re being invited to live. Wisdom is gentle, wisdom knows what it does not know, and wisdom is also tenacious, brave, and far-sighted. 

A moment ago we stood and chanted verses of Psalm 119. We prayed for God to fill our hearts and lives with His statutes, His wisdom, His ways. Pray the psalms at Morning and Evening Prayer here in St Giles’ and on your own using the free Church of England Daily Prayer app (we can show you how), and it will change your life. Live and breath these holy words that countless generations and Jesus Himself used as His prayer book, and together we will live this wisdom revolution. 

But you can be forgiven for losing heart. Just as St Paul writes to the Church in Corinth today in the epistle. You can be forgiven for losing heart every time you see the news. It is real.

Douglas Adams, writes in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:

‘For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.’

Basically, I’m saying, 'twas ever thus’. We speak of progress, and in many ways it's true. But humanity is still humanity.

So, if we aren’t to lurch into an extreme (necessarily half-blind) ideological corner, and if we aren’t to simply become nihilists who sit back with a negroni (as bitter as our hearts) and watch Rome and everything else burn, until we go up in flames with it…what are we to do? 

Well, we have been here before. St Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians, are just one example. He writes: we must refuse to practise cunning, or speak falsehoods, of God’s word or our own. We refuse to play the Devil’s game, even if others around us do - in personal and public life. 

A revolution of wisdom. A revolution of truth and goodness. Look again, he writes: we commend ourselves of conscience and truthfulness, not cunning or strength or the game playing that so often fills the lives of those who appear to be on top. And it may seem, as St Paul writes, for a while that the Gospel is veiled: that evil is winning, that the good guys just get walked over and the bad guys win. And we start to ask, do we need to play dirty just to stay in the game? No.

Because we do not proclaim ourselves, we do not live our own lives only, but we are part of the living Body of Jesus Christ. It is His life we live. And He went to the Cross, because He refused to be anything other than who He truly was. And for precisely the same reason, death could not hold Him. The victory of darkness and evil is always, ultimately, temporary. 

‘For it is God who says [writes St Paul today] ‘let light shine out of darkness’.

A revolution of wisdom, truth, and light. A Jesus revolution. 

And it is that call that St Matthew hears today on his feast day. His own Gospel records this moment. A local guy who has sold his soul to the Roman occupier. Who extorts taxes and his own corrupt slice on top from the poor folk around him, presumably with thugs to protect him from retribution. The ‘Matthews’ of this world are alive and well, and Jesus calls him.

The Pharisees, for all their sincere devotion, had lurched into an extreme corner. They could make a good case, their reactionary but well thought-out YouTube channels and podcasts, would no doubt have impressed many were they here today. They were just tragically detached from the fundamental realities of who God is. In a bruised and battered world, they offered a compelling narrative of how to live, but for all that, they had become strangers to the grace and life of the Living God. 

Jesus quotes Isaiah to them: ‘mercy not sacrifice’. 

In a way sacrifice is much easier. Go to the Temple, buy an animal. It will cost you and you’ll feel the sting, but once you’ve done the deed, you’re done. You have fulfilled your obligation to God and humanity. Sorted.

But mercy? Mercy is much harder. Mercy is an ongoing relationship that makes space for mutual transformation, for forgiveness and thanksgiving. Mercy requires us to be open to the danger of being truly human together; sat round this table with Jesus, and with all those we find most difficult. There is nothing and no one outside God’s love, and therefore there is nothing and no one that we are not called into relationship with. A revolution (in these readings for St Matthew’s Day, and in this holy meal in which we partake) completely the opposite of a prevailing narrative that constantly downgrades our obligations to others, shrinks the human family into tribes, and hardens hearts; that divides to conquer, and exploits rather than serves. 

But we here - we sinners - have been called to live (one moment at a time, one life at a time) a much more costly way. A Jesus revolution of wisdom, truth, and mercy.

Trinity XII Sunday 7th September

by Fr Jack

Jeremiah 18. 1-11

St Paul’s Epistle to Philemon 1-21

St Luke 14. 25-33

Jeremiah says today that God will change His mind. 

God doesn’t change His mind. God is God. Eternity, perfection, divinity - these things don’t change from lesser to more: they can’t. It’s sort of part of the deal.

What Jeremiah reflects here is how often we anthropomorphise God. God is a person, absolutely, but God isn’t an old man in the sky, a bit like us, just bigger, and older, and more in the sky. This could become a sermon about religious language, and what we can and can’t say about God. And I’d enjoy that very much, but that’s not what I want to explore so much this morning.

What I want to acknowledge as we start is that Jeremiah’s words say as much about our human ability to relate to God, who is always beyond our comprehension, as they do about God.

Look at the way Jeremiah speaks about sin. We humans drift off, away from God’s loving plan for us, and things go wrong. And should we be surprised!? And yet, somehow, we always are. We talk of teaching children through consequences. And these are natural consequences. Jeremiah speaks of it like thunder bolts from God in punishment, of course he does. But isn’t it as much revealing the natural consequences of sin? If we go off course by idolising wealth, power, violence, some aspect of our identity or anything else, guess what, we are not being who God made us to be, and things go wrong. Should we be surprised? 

I know I’ve mentioned this before. We poison this beautiful world God has given us, we speak and echo inhumanity, and we are surprised things go wrong?

Sin has natural consequences.

So what are we to do?

Well, now we turn to St Paul’s Letter to Philemon. The Apostle is writing to a part of the Early Church, and he writes of love.

St Paul wants us to see that love is our DNA. Crucially, he says, love, not commands.

Rules and punishments will alter people’s behaviour. They will sometimes prevent the worst of things happening, but they can never achieve the best of things. 

You can stop someone beating up an old lady and nicking her purse with the threat of punishment, but only human flourishing and mutual love can inspire someone to truly love their neighbour, and see Christ in them. The answer (to sin and its myriad consequences) in Jeremiah, in St Paul and in most of all in Jesus, is not regulation but love. 

The Kingdom of God cannot be got to through laws and policing and courts.

And this is not ‘airy fairy’ or ‘pie in the sky’ - here and now we are living into the Kingdom.

We have been baptized into it, and it and it alone will last forever. The answer to heartache and division and fear and violence, is this Kingdom of love, this Kingdom of God. Nothing else will do.

We will taste a fore-taste of it in a few moments when we receive the Body and Blood of the One who rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, into His Kingdom, so that we might follow Him there.

And every day of our lives, we are a people gathered, fed, and sent to be people in whom the world can see Jesus, and smell and taste and know His Kingdom. Even in this world so battered by sin and our broken responses to it. We are baptized and gathered and fed and sent, to be that Kingdom at work, at home, in communities, with friend and enemy, loved one and stranger. 

In some ways our faith is ever-so complicated and mysterious, and requires us all to have 12 PhDs in theology to get anywhere. But then again, our faith is also remarkably straightforward.

And here we get to the Gospel given for today. 

One of those passages that Jesus quite clearly said to provoke people, and it still does today. These words are twenty centuries old, and as sharp as ever. 

‘Hate’ - famously a strong word. And remember Jesus is speaking in a society where familial ties are exceptionally strong. Who you marry, where you live, what you do all day - these were largely not matters of choice. They were determined by your situation and, alongside that, your family or other local hierarchies. So for Jesus to undo all those powerful structures must have been astounding. And then He goes further - you must even hate your own life!?

And perhaps we’re too busy being shocked by this to see that Jesus, in a classically rhetorical stroke of His rabbi’s tongue has not hurt us, but freed us. He has cut us from stifling bonds of approval, of acceptability, of ambition, and comfort, of what others think, of what we think we need to be happy or safe or complete. All of it is cut away in this fiery turn of phrase.

And we are invited, instead, to be nothing other than a disciple of Jesus Christ. 

For some reason I found myself this week (before I’d even read the readings for today) thinking about what it would be like to ask the people around me: ‘what are you?’. Its a rude and pompous question when I ask it, so I don’t think I shall. But, what are you? 

What’s the first thing that comes into your head?

I decided in my idle musings, that I wouldn’t ask, ‘who are you?’, because then you might just answer with your name too instinctively. But, ‘what are you?’. 

Is the first thing that comes into your mind a job title, or a status like ‘a child’ or ‘retired’? Or is it an identity marker, something you’ve had from birth, or one you’ve picked up later?

Jesus today is cutting away all these things, not because He wants to harm us, but because He wants to free us.

I guess it all comes down to this (and thinking about those two analogies Jesus uses of having worked out what you need to have before you start - the tower builder or the king and his army): by needing to have less, we find that we actually have all that we need. 

If all we need to be is a child of God our Father, and a disciple of Jesus Christ, we find that we need nothing more. That we are nothing more. Is that what Jesus means to be free by hating your life? TS Eliot, in Little Gidding, the climax to his magnificent spiritual poems the Four Quartets, leads into a quotation of Julian of Norwich calling it: 

‘A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well.’

If, as we go through life as followers of Jesus, as we live more and more into His Kingdom, if we do acquire more things (possessions, familial relations and the rest of it) we discover that our relationship with them is now quite different. They no longer possess us, but become blessings we desire to hold lightly and to give away.

So - looping back to where we began - Jesus is not commanding us to do this, He is simply inviting us to do this, because He loves you. He isn’t recruiting followers by threats or good sales to boost His own profits. Remember, human beings might act like that, and we so easily act as if God was like us. But, God is God. God’s desire for us is that of a lover, who loves us and knows us more than we could ever love or know ourselves or each other. 

Jesus is not threatening us. He is simply explaining that living worshipping our fantasies about ourselves, our possessions, our social norms… answering the question ‘what are you?’ with something other than ‘I am a child of God, a follower of Jesus Christ’ will never bring us to be our true selves. 

Just as St Paul is trying to tell us, He is not commanding us into His Kingdom, He is loving us into it. And only this love, this Kingdom, can answer the world’s sorry state, all those natural consequences to sin that Jeremiah laments.

I’m not going to tell you how to put this into practice. We all have different false gods that need disposing of, and it’s always a constant process of renewal, of liberation. But I am going to suggest that we all ask for God’s help in the silence after Holy Communion and in your private prayers this week. Begin again today and every day of our lives to be free for the Kingdom, because that alone will last forever.

Feast of Saint Bartholomew 24th August 2025

by Westcott House Ordinand Sarah Fagg 

May I speak in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen 

Today the church celebrates Saint Bartholomew also known as Nathaniel. He is one of the 12 Apostles. He is most well known for his missionary work. It is said that he suffered a rather gruesome martyrdom, possibly by being flayed alive and then crucified or burned alive. 

Nathaniel is known for acclaiming that Jesus “is the son of God, the King of Israel”. Which can be found in John’s Gospel. Perhaps one of the first disciples to go from doubt when he says to Philip “can anything good come from Nazareth”to full acceptance of who Jesus is. 

Saint Bartholomew’s openness about his doubt leads him to encounter God. Even when he was doubtful at first his inquisitive step towards Jesus was enough and the presence of the Son of God was made known to him. It seems God encourages honesty about our doubts because then they can be transformed into belief. 

In our passages today, they seem to be connected in calling us to have faith. To reflect on what might be possible when we have faith in God. That we can obtain eyes that see, ears that hear. That we can be confident in a God that heals. That through God’s grace we are called to be transformed into holiness leading us to serve and care for one another. 

In the Isaiah passage it talks about people who have eyes, but are blind, people who have ears but are unable to hear. I don’t know about people here today but when I read these passages and knowing Isaiah was prophesying to people who had strayed away from their faithfulness to God, I often say an internal prayer, Lord please let me hear you and please let me see you!

It leads to questions what could it mean to have been given these gifts from God eyes and ears?What do we miss if we don’t use them to see and hear the grace God wants to show us. 

We are called to worship God, so what could it look like to first we use our eyes and ears to praise God and build a relationship with Him? To be faithful in seeking out what God wants to show us. 

The passage goes on to explain that there is no other Saviour but God, so we ought to use our senses to connect to Him. There may be times especially when perhaps we have lost faithfulness that our senses are detached from God. We may be tempted to turn towards false idols. 

It is fair to say that perhaps when we do not see and hear the signs we would hope for from God we may well begin to look elsewhere. But my encouragement from the Isaiah passage is to keep faithful and keep looking towards God.Even when it is hard and we want to avoid God, let’s try to continually turn our gaze towards God. 

In our passage from Acts, we have beautiful examples of faith within the early church. People bringing out those who are ill knowing that the Holy Spirit has been gifted to the church giving grace to heal. What could it have felt like to be a member of the early church? Or even to be an Apostle? It must have felt incredible to be able to heal and demonstrate God’s love for people in a physical way.

It would have taken a strong faith - faith by the Apostles that the Holy Spirit would guide them inproviding healing. Also the faith of the people of the towns who were gathering people and believed that they would be healed. The fruits of this faith was that the disciples grew in number and the gospel was able to be shared with more people. Bringing hope to more people. 

May we have faith that we can seek the Holy Spirit to guide us in providing healing to those we meet. Also that God will use us to bring more people into a relationship with Him. 

In our gospel passage it shows the usual topsy turvy world of the gospel. The person who is the youngest is the wisest, the person who we would expect to be served is the one who serves. 

It is interesting to consider what it means to be like a child and why Jesus says this is important.This is also not the first time Jesus mentions being like a children in order to go into the kingdom of heaven. 

I don’t think Jesus is advocating that we all become people who believe anything that we are told. More that we have a broader faith because we will all have at times experienced the wonders and miracles of God. This can also provide comfort that even when things are not so good or perhaps God seems distant we can have faith and hope because we have seen the miracles and mysteries of God. 

The Gospel passage provides a challenge for us today, in that it encourages us to be generous with our time and to serve one another. This can at times push us into feeling guilty or perhaps like we do not do enough, but I would like to provide encouragement that I have witnessed beautiful love and service in the short time I have been in this wonderful community. It has been a blessing to be with you all, the welcome I have received has been truly inspiring. I am almost certain this place and community honours God. 

The Gospel also seems to be broken down into two sections. What we can do now whilst living on earth and what may happen when we enter the kingdom.

The passage moves us towards a heavenly banquet where in God’s kingdom we will be invited to eat, drink and sit at the table with God. We are fortunate that we receive a foretaste of this at the Eucharist. Today when we approach the altar we are united with heaven, how amazing is that, we are invited to sit and eat with God in his Kingdom. What an incredible uncomprehensible gift we have been given. 

We can have faith that through the Holy Spirit, Christ is made truly present to us in the bread and wine. The gift which Christ left us which we need humility and faith to try to comprehend the mystery, but also that it transforms us to go out into the world and serve our community. 

It may not always be clear where God is and how His goodness is poured out into the world. But on this Feast of Saint Bartholomew, he provides an example that even a grain of curiosity and faith is enough to lead us to God which can direct us to have eyes that see beyond our initial doubts. 

So as we journey into the week ahead I would like to encourage us to put our faith in God, even when He may seem distant. Let us be bold like Saint Bartholomew to follow God even when we are not certain, and have comfort that God will work within us and through us, even when we have doubt. That through faithfulness, we can build a deeper rooted relationship with God, knowing that we can put our trust in Him. Amen

Ninth Sunday after Trinity, by Edward Smyth of the Prison Reform Trust

17th August 2025

Isaiah 5.1-7, Hebrews 11.29-12.2, St Luke 22.49-56

‘And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness but heard cries of distress.’ 

I ought, really, to begin this slot as a guest preacher by thanking Fr Jack for the invitation to this splendid church which is, as it happens, mere moments from the office of the Prison Reform Trust where I am the Head of Development. 

And indeed I fully intended to do so...until I looked at today’s readings and realised that Fr Jack had, in fact, quite royally done me over. 

Because this is a bracing set of readings for a quiet summer Sunday in central London. The compilers of the lectionary, I can only assume, feared that our concentration may have lapsed in the heat – that we had perhaps become complacent...yep, God is Love, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, love your neighbour – got it. What time’s lunch? 

I confess, I quite like my Jesus Victorian. Meek and mild; no crying he makes; cherubic and squidgy. ‘I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled. Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.’ 

Ah. 

About three months ago I travelled – for the first time – to HMP Swaleside, a high-security men’s prison on the Isle of Sheppey. Swaleside is a troubled place – what some in my world would call a ‘proper prison,’ holding mostly prisoners serving very long sentences for some very unpleasant crimes – and it is a prison which has chronic issues with drugs being delivered by drone, violence, and genuinely shocking levels of self-harm and suicide. 

I am not a Londoner by upbringing, and I am therefore not one of those people for whom the world outside Zone 1 is a terrifying place, and comes to an end entirely as one reaches the M25. But the trip to Swaleside was striking. I often describe prisons as society’s ‘dark places,’ – places where we send people at least in part to forget about them – but I have rarely had that sense of a division from society so starkly demonstrated. There was something genuinely disconcerting about that trip: crossing the Kingsferry Bridge onto the Isle of Sheppey, rain beating down on the windscreen; following the map away from civilisation down roads of increasingly loneliness before, finally, turning into a gloomy lane which ran a mile towards the three forbidding prisons of the ‘Sheppey Cluster.’ Other than a few wind turbines there was nothing else so far as the eye could see. As I arrived a bus disgorged its passengers. There are very few sadder sights than arriving at a prison as a ‘family visit’ is about to take place: the vision of a handful of – mainly – women with small children inadequately wrapped up against the horizontal rain was a sobering one. 

This kind of ‘out of town’ prison is now the norm. There are obvious economic and practical arguments in favour of putting prisons in the middle of nowhere; but more fundamentally this is a direct consequence of a shift in society’s philosophy of punishment which we can date roughly to the eighteenth century. It is at that point, as any of you who know your Foucault will – gorily – remember, that the state’s response to criminal behaviour began to shift from the body (deterrence) to the mind (rehabilitation). Before that – indeed for many thousands of years – prison was where you went to await your punishment (execution, flogging, deportation etc); after this prison was your punishment. And so with more and more people spending longer and longer in prison as an end in itself, more and larger prisons were required...and today we find ourselves with massive warehouse-style prisons – such as the new HMP Millsike in Yorkshire, the opening of which I attended in March – built on land sold to the Government by now extremely wealthy pig farmers. His attendance at the ribbon-cutting at Millsike was an odd sight indeed. 

A common response to the kind of things I have just said – about the terrible conditions at HMP Swaleside and about the shift towards out-of-town prisons – is ‘Who cares?’ – and I don’t know, perhaps there are people here this morning thinking the same thing. Prisoners are hardly a sympathetic group, an observation borne out by successive governments’ handling of issues of criminal justice: anything other than ‘more punitive’ and ‘more prisons’ is a guaranteed vote-loser. 

A vicar friend of mine once told me that the moment a preacher says ‘as T.S. Eliot wrote...’ he immediately switches off and starts thinking about the football. In my line of work the equivalent is ‘as Churchill once said.’ As Churchill once said... well...actually, he didn’t say what usually comes next, which tends to be that ‘you can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners.’ That was Dostoyevsky. And it’s a decent sentiment in my view, but it’s not as good as what Churchill actually said which I am going to recount, with apologies both for its length, and for the inevitable moment I slip into a Jim Hacker-style impression – surprisingly difficult not to do. 

The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the state and even of convicted criminals against the state, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry of all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if only you can find it in the heart of every person – 

these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it. 

There’s a reason I began this sermon with a line from today’s Epistle. Because if you go into a contemporary British prison looking for justice, you will all too often find bloodshed instead. And if you go into a contemporary British prison looking for righteousness you will all too often – always, in fact – hear the cries of distress instead. Our prisons are a disgrace, and I maintain this: 

-  It is perfectly possible to believe that prison is an appropriate expression of society’s censure of an act and be a Christian

-  It is perfectly possible to believe that there are some people who quite simply cannot ever be released from prison and be a Christian

-  It is perfectly possible to believe that one of the functions of prison is to deter others from behaving in a similar way and be a Christian

- But it is not possible to be a Christian and to think that prison should be a place where hope is extinguished, where people are and should be harmed and, all too often by their own hand and by the hands of others, killed, and where rehabilitation is all too often not even attempted. 

And that is the reality of our prisons today; and that is why we should care.

There are plenty of people in my world who advocate for the abolition of prisons. I am not one of them; and nor is my employer. Plenty of people in prison believe the same thing, incidentally: that their sentence is entirely justified and, in fact, that serving it is part of their process of atonement. I think I can take as read that, as Christians, we cannot condone a blanket throw-away-the-key approach. As such, most people will be released from prison one day and it is in society’s interest to ensure that they emerge better, not worse, than they went in. But more than that, it is simply the right thing to do. To do otherwise is to scapegoat; to condemn; to hate the sinner and not the sin; to refuse to see that treasure in the heart of every man and women, if only we can find it. It is the state’s job to punish. It is our job to look for the treasure. Those two things can happen at once and they should happen at once. All too often we won’t find it. But to look is our calling. To allow prisoners’ appropriate and justified division from society to serve as an excuse not to look – not to care? Then we deny that calling. 

The end of our Gospel reading today has Christ admonishing the crowd as ‘hypocrites!’ for being able to interpret signs of the weather, but failing to interpret – or, rather, choosing not to interpret – the signs of the times. Too often we fall into the trap of allowing our interpretation of God’s call on us and our lives to ossify: we find an interpretation we’re happy with, and we stick to it, living our lives comfortable under the misapprehension that we’re doing what’s asked of us. But God’s call is a living thing, and it is whispered into our ears all our lives long. God will sometimes ask new, difficult things of us. Our views on people in prison and our attitude towards them I think similarly ossify. But that Epistle passage is for me – and perhaps, I hope, for you – a whisper worth listening to and, crucially, responding to. 

And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; 

For righteousness, but heard cries of distress. 

Amen. 

Installation Service of the Master Barber

14th August 2025

By Fr Jack

The three hymns that the Master and Mistress have chosen for us to sing tonight are from their wedding. It is lovely to sing them with you now, Master and Mistress, to rejoice in your love, but also because it shows just what magnificent hymns these are. Hymns, truly, for all occasions. 

Look again at them… (Praise my soul the king of heaven. Lord of all hopefulness. All my hope on God is founded) 

There is not a day in anyone’s life that is not expressed and enriched, cleansed and calibrated by words and music like these. Sing more hymns!

On days of joy, sadness, weariness, worry, boredom or nothing much. Hymns like these are treasures that speak into every part of life.

And the reason I say all that, is because we Barbers share a similar God-given vocation. Like these hymns, we are called to be evergreen, to speak blessing into the realities of life, and to be stewards and sharers of God-given treasures. Let me explain.

Firstly.

Another year turns, another Master is installed. It is the same as it has always been, and yet tradition (at least as the Christian tradition bids us understand it) is alive. Tradition is alive with lives and stories of the people who have received it, who live it, and who pass it on. This is the story of the Church. This is the story of the Livery. 

This is the human story. We here proclaim that we are not self-creating independent units, but treasuries of relationship and connectedness. People and God together.

Secondly. 

As a Company, we bring the hodge-podge mixture of our lives (all those joys, sadnesses, weariness, worries, boredom or nothing much-es) and we quite literally embody together that reality, that mixture. The very fabric of our lives (and through us the whole human family) is hallowed by being brought through us now to church in prayer and worship, and hallowed too in the fellowship of our common table. We are guests of the Lord at dinner, as well as in church.

Thirdly.

We also see our hymn-like vocation in what we come together to do. The Court met this afternoon in an act of trust. To entrust the life and story of our Company to a new Master and set of Wardens. We come to Church now to entrust the Master, Wardens, our Company, and the whole human family to God: recognising quite deliberately that the really important things of this life are not ours to possess. The wisdom, skill, love and imagination we need (in professional life, at home and in the Company) are not, honestly, ours. They are gifts, from God, just as St Paul tells us in the third reading this evening.

The Master has spent many years using his gifts to treasure life, specifically the lives of the children he has served as a paediatric oncologist. Our company also expresses its vocation by celebrating you Master and your work. You have done just as Jesus says in tonight’s second reading, by treasuring the little ones the Lord loves, and bids us all become like.

Let me draw these threads together and finish. In the first reading, Jesus speaks the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. These words, like those of our hymns are evergreen. If you were to speak them every day of your life they would never grow stale and never be out of place. They honour the messy reality of the human experience, and they speak of a courageous hope. Not a pipe dream, not naivety or fairy stories, but courageous hope. They speak into the story that is our story, of people and God - through love and service, worship and prayer, community and every gift that God gives us - living more and more towards the Kingdom of God, here and now, and in the hereafter. 

Pray that these realties of the evergreen vocation of our Company will flourish in us, for our good and the good of all. 

Pray that the Master will have a wonderful year, as he and we fulfil our vocation to steward and share the treasures and gifts with which we have been entrusted. 

Pray that our life together - by who we are, what we do, and how we do it - will speak of the courageous hope, healing and life of God’s Kingdom.

Panis Angelicus, Bread of Angels. St Thomas Aquinas’ great hymn to Holy Communion - the Daily and Heavenly Bread Sunday by Sunday and day by day that gives us all we need for life’s pilgrimage. 

The second verse is a fitting prayer for us now:

Thee, therefore, we implore,
O Godhead, One in Three,
so may Thou visit us
as we now worship Thee;
and lead us on Thy way,

and lead us on Thy way,
That we at last may see
the light wherein Thou dwellest aye.
Amen.

Homily for Evensong, by The Rev’d Lucy Newman Cleeve
3rd August 2025
Genesis 50:4–26, 1 Corinthians 14:1–19

There are some lessons we only learn slowly.

Sometimes, the gifts we’re given early in life arrive before we have the wisdom to use them well. That seemed to be the case for Joseph. At seventeen, he was given vivid dreams by God – true ones, prophetic ones – but he didn’t yet understand what they were for. He shared them with his brothers, and not with much tact: dreams in which they all bowed down to him. Unsurprisingly, their response was not admiration. Genesis puts it simply: “They hated him all the more.”

Joseph had been entrusted with something sacred, but at that age, he used it to elevate himself, not to serve.

But in those long, difficult years of slavery, false accusation, and prison that followed, something shifted. Joseph came to see his gifts differently: not as signs of his importance, but as instruments in God's work. By the time we meet him in Genesis 50, the self-importance has given way to humility. He no longer sees his dreams as a mark of status, but as part of God’s purpose to preserve life.

When his brothers come to him, afraid he will retaliate now that their father is dead, he speaks not of what they deserve, but of what God has done. “You meant it for harm,” he says to them, “but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many lives should be saved.”

That phrase – “the saving of many lives” – echoes like a refrain across scripture. It names the heart of God’s work from beginning to end: not the exaltation of the gifted, but the rescue and renewal of the world. Joseph’s gifts remain, but their purpose has shifted. No longer a means of status, they have become an offering of service.

And it is this same movement – from self to service – that Paul addresses in the church at Corinth. The Spirit has been poured out, gifts have been received – but some are using them to impress rather than to edify. Paul doesn’t question the gifts themselves. He questions the heart behind them. “Those who speak in a tongue build up themselves,” he says, “but those who prophesy build up the church.” Gifts that dazzle may win attention, but they do not necessarily build.

What Paul calls for is a reordering of desire: not to be noticed, but to be useful. Not to perform, but to serve. It is, in its own way, a kind of death and resurrection. A letting go of “look what I can do,” and a turning towards, “Lord, what would you have me offer?”

This is the pattern we see most fully in Christ. The one who had all power did not cling to it. He emptied himself, took the form of a servant, gave himself away. His gifts were never turned inward – they were always offered outward, for the healing of the world, for the saving of many lives.

And here is the invitation: the same Spirit who shaped Joseph through adversity, the same Spirit who gifted and guided the church at Corinth, has been given to us. Not for display, but for participation in God’s work. Whatever our gifts – visible or hidden, dramatic or quiet – they are given for love’s sake. For the building up of the body. For the common good.

And like Joseph, we are invited to think beyond ourselves. At the end of his life, Joseph is not concerned with his own legacy. He is looking forward – trusting in promises he will not live to see fulfilled. “God will surely come to you,” he says, “and bring you up out of this land.” That is what mature faith sounds like: a vision stretched beyond the present, gifts offered into a future we may not fully understand.

So we ask ourselves, gently and honestly:
Where have we used our gifts to serve our own image rather than others’ good?
Where might God be inviting us to lay down self-concern, and take up deeper service?
What might it look like, in our own lives, to become instruments of grace and participate in God’s ministry for the saving of many?

Seventh after Trinity, by The Rev'd Lucy Newman Cleeve

3rd August 2005
Hosea 11:1-11, Colossians 3:1-11, Luke 12:13-21

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the preview of Inter Alia at the National Theatre. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it – and I’ll try not to give too much away.

At its heart is Jessica Parks, a Crown Court judge who has built her career around advocating for justice, especially for survivors of sexual violence. In the courtroom, she’s incisive and courageous, resisting victim-blaming and holding the powerful to account. At home, she is something else: a mother, pouring herself into the daily, demanding work of raising her son, Harry. She’s tried to do everything right, guiding him with patience, compassion, and fierce love. She’s had the hard conversations about consent and respect, about online culture and boundaries. She’s done what many parents do: tried to shape a decent young man in a complicated world.

Then, on the cusp of adulthood, Harry goes to a party. There’s drink. There’s a girl. Something happens – or is alleged to have happened – and suddenly Jessica is thrown into a storm she can’t escape. The case isn’t hers to judge, but she can’t step aside. She is mother, and she is judge. And now those two roles – love and justice – come into terrible conflict.

She doesn’t stop loving Harry, but the values she has spent a lifetime defending – truth, fairness, accountability – seem to stand on the other side of a line her son may have crossed. And the play offers no easy resolution. We're left with the agonising question: when someone you love deeply has done something terrible, how do you hold love and justice together?

That’s the question at the heart of our first reading from the prophet Hosea – a passage that gives us a glimpse into God’s own wrestling with that same, impossible love. “When Israel was a child, I loved him,” God says through Hosea, “and out of Egypt I called my son.” This isn’t the voice of a remote or abstract deity. It’s something far more intimate – a parent remembering.

The imagery is tender, beyond what we might expect from ancient Near Eastern religious language: “It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms… I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks, and I bent down to them and fed them.” It’s one of the most moving images in all of Scripture: God as the nurturing parent, steadying Israel’s steps, lifting them with delight, bending down with infinite care to feed them. This is the God we worship – not a distant judge, but the one who taught us our first steps in faith. Who still calls us, not because we are worthy, but because he loves us and delights in us.

But then comes the heartbreak: “The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals.” Despite all that tender love, Israel turns away — seeking safety in idols, placing their trust in foreign powers, and forgetting the one who had loved them from the beginning.

It isn’t just a moment of rebellion – it’s persistent. God calls, and they walk away. Not all at once, but not unaware either. Other voices become more compelling. Other promises seem more secure. And the covenant – the love that first formed them – is set aside.

Listen to the anguish in God’s voice: “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” These aren’t rhetorical questions. They reveal God's genuine emotional struggle. The Hebrew suggests God's heart literally "overturning" within.

Any of us who have ever wrestled with loving someone through their difficult choices, who have wondered whether to keep pursuing or to step back and protect ourselves from further hurt, can understand something of this divine anguish. But of course, in this story, we are actually more like Israel.

And in Hosea’s vision, Israel’s choices are not without consequence. The people’s refusal to return leads to collapse: foreign powers rise, violence spreads in the cities, leaders are consumed by their own schemes. God is present – but seemingly silent. It appears the story might end in judgment.

But then comes the turning point, the moment that changes everything. A declaration that transforms our understanding of God's nature: “I will not execute my fierce anger... for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” This is one of the most powerful moments in all of Scripture. God’s holiness is not revealed in punishment, but in mercy. It does not destroy. It transforms.

But how does that transformation take place? Paul begins to answer that question in his letter to the Colossians. The change he describes isn’t about behaviour management or trying harder to be good. It’s ontological – a death and a rebirth, a letting go of the old self and the emergence of something new: “You have died,” Paul writes, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Through baptism, through faith, through the mystery we celebrate at this table, we participate in Christ’s death and resurrection. The old self – the one that sought security in false gods and fragile promises – has died. And a new self is being raised, grounded not in fear or striving, but in love.

“When Christ, who is your life, is revealed,” Paul continues, “then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” We live in that tension – between what is already true, and what is still becoming. Already we are loved. Already we are held in God. Already we are being transformed. But the fullness of that life is still being revealed.

And because this is true – because we are hidden in Christ, because we are held by mercy – we are free to begin the work of real change. Not to earn God’s love, but because we already live within it.

Paul names what needs to be put to death: patterns of desire that distort our humanity – sexual immorality, greed, anger, malice, slander. These aren’t arbitrary rules; they’re symptoms of the old self that has forgotten what it means to be made in the image of God. And then he names what we are to put on: the new self, being renewed in knowledge and likeness – day by day, clothed in Christ. 

This new life in Christ is not just about individual renewal; it brings about a new kind of community.

“Here there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free – but Christ is all, and in all.”

This is the fruit of transformation: not private piety or compartmentalised religion, but a community reshaped by love — one that transcends the boundaries we so often cling to. Racial, cultural, economic, social: the walls come down. Our habits of comparison and control begin to loosen. We start to see one another differently. Speak differently. Live differently.

This, too, is the love we glimpsed in Hosea — the love that did not abandon, even when spurned. A love that does not coerce but patiently reshapes. And in Colossians, we begin to see what that reshaping entails: not imposed from the outside but awakened and sustained from within. Not as something we achieve, but as something we are drawn into. A response to a mercy already given.

But not all respond. And that brings us to the Gospel.

Jesus’ parable of the rich fool offers a stark contrast — a glimpse of what happens when we forget whose we are. Here is someone who has not been transformed. Someone who has never known what it is to be held by God’s love.

Listen to his language: “my crops, my barns, my grain, my goods.” Everything is “mine.” He speaks only to himself. He imagines no claim beyond his own. “Soul,” he says, “you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” He places his trust in accumulation, not in grace.

The Greek word Jesus uses for greed – pleonexia – speaks of that insatiable hunger for more. When we do not know God’s care, we try to feed ourselves. When we forget that we are loved, we hoard.

But God's response is swift and sobering: “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared – whose will they be?” All that he called “mine” turns out to belong to someone else. The life he tried to secure slips through his fingers. “So it is,” Jesus says, “for those who store up treasures for themselves, but are not rich toward God.”

What does it mean to be rich toward God?
It means living as those who know they are loved.
It means trusting in God’s faithfulness and provision, not in our own control.
It means remembering whose we are – even when the world tells us otherwise.

This morning, as we prepare to come to the table, we are reminded that God’s holiness and love are not in conflict but work together in a single movement of grace: to redeem, to reshape, to restore.

This bread and wine speak of a love that would rather enter death than abandon us. But they also speak of a holiness that does not leave us unchanged. The love that receives us also remakes us.

So the question isn’t only whether we believe in God's love – but whether we are learning to live as those held by it.
Where are we still seeking security in our own barns and goods?
What habits of the old self are no longer ours to carry?
How might the vision of new humanity reshape our relationships – our lives together?

As we come to this table, we come as people still learning to walk in God's love. Still being lifted. Still being fed. Still being transformed – not by our own efforts, but by the mercy of the one who bends low to meet us.

Come, then –
All who know your need of grace.
All who long to be made new.
Come and be nourished by the one who will not let you go.
Come, and live into the love that is already yours.

Amen.

Homily for Evensong, by The Rev’d Lucy Newman Cleeve
RCO Summer Course, 29th July 2005
1 Samuel 6:1-16, Luke 21:5-19

May I speak in the name of the Father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

As musicians, you understand the power of beauty to move us – that moment when a resonant chord fills a cathedral space, when architecture and acoustics and artistry converge into something transcendent. The disciples felt something similar standing before the temple. They were gazing up in wonder at its massive stones, its beautiful decorations, its overwhelming grandeur: “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and buildings!”

But this wasn’t just architectural appreciation. They were looking at the very symbol of God’s presence, the guarantee of divine protection, the centre of their religious and national identity. If anything could make them feel secure about the future, surely it was this magnificent temple that seemed to embody the divine itself.

Then Jesus said something that must have felt like a knife through their aesthetic appreciation: “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another.” It’s jarring, isn’t it? Like someone interrupting your most moving performance to announce the concert hall is going to be demolished.

No wonder they immediately asked: “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign?” When the very thing that represents God’s permanence is threatened, we desperately want advance warning, some way to prepare, some sign to help us navigate the uncertainty.

In our increasingly uncertain times, we all know this feeling – when something we thought was permanent suddenly isn’t. The Philistines experienced it too. They’d captured Israel’s sacred Ark as a war trophy, but instead of victory, they got mysterious plagues. Their prize became their curse.

Desperate for answers, they devised an ingenious test. They took two milk cows – mothers with nursing calves who had never been yoked – and hitched them to a cart carrying the Ark. Every maternal instinct would drive these animals back to their babies. If they went toward Israelite territory instead, it could only mean divine intervention.

Against all natural instinct, the cows headed straight for Beth-shemesh, bellowing in distress as they left their young behind. Clear, undeniable proof that Israel’s God was real and active.

But when the disciples ask Jesus for similar certainty – a sign to help them navigate the temple’s destruction – he refuses. Instead, he promises something harder: “This will be your opportunity to bear testimony. I will give you words and wisdom that none of your opponents can withstand or contradict.”

Here’s the difference: the Philistines got their sign so they could manage a crisis and move on. But they also had to choose. They could have dug in defensively, holding onto the Ark as a trophy of conquest. Instead, they chose the harder path of acknowledging what they didn’t understand and making costly restitution.

Jesus calls his followers to a similar choice. In our own age of anxiety – when many feel that familiar foundations are shifting – we can retreat into defensive positions, trying to preserve some imagined golden age. Or we can follow Jesus’ harder path: seeing crisis as opportunity, uncertainty as an invitation to deeper trust.

Even as he warns of persecution and betrayal, Jesus makes an extraordinary pledge: "Not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls."

True faith doesn’t promise to preserve our comfortable arrangements unchanged. It promises something better: that even when everything we thought was permanent crumbles, we are held – soul-deep, eternally held – by something no earthly power can touch or destroy. The question isn’t whether we’re living in uncertain times. The question is: will we read these signs with fear or with faith?

Amen

Homily for Evensong by The Rev’d Lucy Newman Cleeve

6^th July 2025

Genesis 29:1-20. Mark 6:7-29

I’m not sure I should admit this in the company of so many serious musicians… but on Friday night, I took my daughters to see Clueless: The Musical. Actually, it was better than expected - music by KT Tunstall, clever lyrics, lots of fun.

The musical is based on the 1995 film of the same name, which is itself a modern reimagining of Jane Austen’s Emma. Each version centres on a confident young woman who takes it upon herself to manage other people’s lives - usually with mixed results. She reshapes those around her to suit her own ideals of beauty, romance, and social harmony. Behind the comedy is a deeper theme: how easily we fall into the habit of treating people as projects, or pawns - shaping them to fit our needs, our plans, or our status.

That same dynamic is at work in today’s Bible readings. In Genesis, we meet Jacob on a journey. It began in deception - he tricked his older twin brother Esau, first out of his inheritance, and later out of their father Isaac’s blessing. That betrayal shattered the family, and Jacob fled east to escape Esau’s rage.

Now, years later, he arrives in Haran and falls in love with his cousin Rachel. He offers to work seven years to marry her. But on the wedding night, her father Laban tricks him - substituting Leah, the older sister. Jacob wakes up next to the wrong bride.

So he works another seven years for Rachel. That’s fourteen years of labour. And in all of this, Rachel and Leah are silent. Their futures, their marriages, even their bodies are traded like bargaining chips. Rachel is loved but voiceless. Leah is overlooked and used to deceive. Their father profits. Jacob, once the trickster, is now tricked.

This isn’t just a story about one family. It reveals a wider pattern in Scripture and in human life: people being treated not as people, but as tools - means to an end. Relationships reduced to transactions. Women silenced. Love entangled with power. And in that web, everyone loses something - dignity, agency, trust.

We see something similar in today’s Gospel reading from Mark. Herod throws a lavish banquet. The daughter of Herodias dances before his guests, and Herod is so pleased - so publicly flattered - that he makes a rash vow: “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it.”

The girl turns to her mother for advice. And Herodias seizes the moment: “The head of John the Baptist.”

Here again, people become pawns in the games of others. And no one in the room speaks up—not the guests, not the courtiers, not even Herod himself, who we're told "liked to listen" to John and was “deeply grieved” by the request. But he grants it anyway. The dance must go on. The promise must be kept. The image must be protected. And so a man dies, a young woman is entangled in violence, and a mother uses her daughter for revenge. Once again, a person’s life is sacrificed to preserve status, power, and reputation.

But Jesus shows a different way. When He sends out the twelve disciples, He entrusts them with real authority. He prepares them for the journey - not with money, or extra clothes, or clever strategies - but with honesty, simplicity, and dignity. He treats them not as pawns in a campaign, but as partners in the work of healing and proclaiming the kingdom of God.

And even Jacob - who once manipulated others to get ahead - begins to change. He works seven years, then seven more, and the text tells us “they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her.” Something begins to soften in him. Love, not manipulation, transforms him.

These stories - of deception, control, complicity, transformation - ask us searching questions. Where do we, even subtly, shape others to serve our own comfort or image?
Where are we tempted to stay silent in the face of manipulation or harm? And where, like Jacob, have we begun to discover that love, not power, is what truly changes us?

The good news is not that we are safe from being used: Scripture is honest about the ways people get caught in systems and schemes beyond their control. The good news is that God is not like Laban. God is not like Herod. God does not manipulate, coerce, or bargain for loyalty. In Christ, we are not managed. We are met. We are not used. We are known. And we are called, not to grasp for control, or to shape others in our image, but to walk the road with open hands, open hearts, and trust in the One who sends us with dignity and love.

Amen.

Third Sunday after Trinity by The Rev'd Lucy Newman Cleeve

6^th July 2025
2 Kings 5:1–14, Galatians 6:1–16, Luke 10:1–11

Some of you will know that for a number of years I ran a contemporary art gallery. Several times a year, we would pack up our best pieces and travel to international art fairs: Hong Kong, Miami, New York, Basel. I would invest thousands of pounds on booth fees, shipping and accommodation, then spend a long weekend on my feet, trying to sell the work and place it in the right collections.

I spent a lot of time watching people, trying to work out who the serious collectors or museum curators might be. It was very easy to start making assumptions. You would look for expensive clothes, a confident manner, the gallery representatives hovering nearby with champagne, ready to fawn over someone who looked the part.

But those visible cues were not always reliable. Some collectors deliberately dressed down, and some sent assistants or researchers ahead of them to scope things out. The person in trainers and a hoodie, quietly circling back to look again, might turn out to be the assistant to a major museum director. The unassuming woman taking photographs and making notes on her smart phone could be working on behalf of a private foundation. The gatekeeper did not always look like the person you expected.

If you were not careful, you could start to treat people differently depending on what you thought they could offer. You would find yourself paying attention to all the wrong things.

It’s a pattern we easily fall into elsewhere too, assuming that value looks a certain way or that importance will always announce itself. The world prizes appearances, credentials and status, but the ways of God often confound our expectations.

Our reading from 2 Kings introduces us to Naaman, a military commander from Aram, in what is now Syria. At the time, Israel was a small and vulnerable kingdom, overshadowed by greater regional powers. Aram was not merely a rival but a frequent enemy. So this is not just a story about a foreigner, but someone whose victories have come at Israel’s expense, someone who represented a real and present threat.

And yet, with striking theological irony, the text tells us that it was through Naaman that the Lord had given victory to Aram. Even here, in the life of Israel’s adversary, God is somehow at work.

Naaman is powerful, decorated, respected. He has the king’s favour and the resources of a nation behind him. But none of that can touch his private suffering. Despite all he controls, he carries a chronic skin condition that he cannot cure.

Into this story walks someone we barely notice: an unnamed servant girl, an Israelite captive. She has no voice, no authority, no freedom, yet she sees clearly. She remembers that healing is possible and has the courage to say so.

It is a quietly radical moment: the voice of hope comes not from a prophet or general, but from the one person in the story with no power at all. It would have been so easy for her to stay silent. But she speaks.

And Naaman listens. He makes the journey to Israel. But his pride is still in charge. He arrives at Elisha’s house with horses and chariots, expecting ceremony. Instead, he gets a message: “Go and wash in the Jordan.”

No dramatic encounter. No special ritual.

Naaman is furious. “Are not the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel?” he demands. His sense of entitlement, his need for something difficult or impressive, almost prevents his healing.

It is his servants, again the ones with no rank, who gently intervene. “If the prophet had asked you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? So why not do the simple thing?”

Eventually, Naaman relents. He goes down to the river. He lets go. He is cleansed.

The man who expected to be honoured is healed through humility. The powerful man is saved by listening to the powerless. Grace meets him not in spectacle, but in the ordinary waters of a foreign river.

I often find myself returning to the servant girl. She is easy to overlook, but without her, there is no healing. She could have stayed quiet. She could have resented her captor. But she chose mercy.

Her action may seem small, but it changes everything. Scripture so often lifts up those without voice or power, those on the margins, as vessels of grace and truth. The youngest son, the barren woman, the foreigner, the child, the unnamed slave — again and again, God works through those we are quickest to overlook. God’s power is often disguised; it rarely wears the robes we expect.

The same theme continues in our Gospel reading. Jesus sends out seventy-two disciples in pairs. The instructions are striking in their simplicity: take no purse, no bag, no sandals. Rely entirely on the hospitality of strangers. Speak peace. Heal the sick. Say, “The kingdom of God has come near.”

No backup plan. No funding model. No qualifications required.

Jesus does not say, “First go and study theology, then take a course in mission, then get your references in order.” He simply says, “Go.”

How often we complicate discipleship. We tell ourselves we are not ready. We build elaborate prerequisites before we will risk obedience. Sometimes that comes from fear, a reluctance to take the risk. But sometimes it comes from pride. We want to tell ourselves that we are worthy. We want our effort, our preparation, our sense of readiness to count. It is hard to receive grace when we want to prove ourselves deserving.

But Jesus calls people in process: fishermen; tax collectors; people who are learning as they go.

The seventy-two do not go out because they’re the finished product. They go out because they are willing.

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul confronts both over-complication and pride, those impulses that lead us to add layers to grace, or to believe we can earn it. Some insisted that Gentile converts must be circumcised, adding human expectation to what God had made simple.

Paul will have none of it: “For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything.”

We are not defined by credentials. We are not saved by performance. We are transformed by grace, made new through the Spirit, drawn into a life that bears fruit not through striving but through surrender.

That doesn’t mean our choices don’t matter. Paul’s image of sowing and reaping reminds us that our actions have consequences. But those consequences grow from the kind of seed we plant, whether we sow to the Spirit or to the self.

Each of these readings asks us to look again at what we assume about power, importance, and grace. They challenge us to notice the voices we are quickest to overlook. To pay attention when wisdom comes from the edge.

They invite us to ask whether we are still trying to earn what can only be received. Whether our pride is getting in the way of obedience. Whether we are delaying our response to God because we want to feel more ready—more qualified, more worthy. Do we make space in our churches for voices that are unpolished or unfamiliar? Do we expect God to act in ways that suit our preferences? Or are we listening for the quiet instruction to go and wash in the river?

God comes near, often nearer than we realise, but not always in the way we expect.

In a few moments, we will gather at the Lord's Table. It is the great leveller. The place where Naaman the commander and the servant girl meet. The place where the seasoned believer and the new disciple kneel side by side.

We come not because we have earned it. Not because we are holy. But because Christ has invited us.

The water that washed Naaman reminds us of baptism's waters, where we too are named and cleansed. The sending of the disciples reminds us of our calling: not to carry everything, but to travel light, trusting the God who provides. Paul's vision of the new creation reminds us that the old categories - insider and outsider, clean and unclean, powerful and weak - no longer hold sway.

What matters is the new life that Christ is shaping in us, a life marked by humility, trust and obedience.

The kingdom of God has come near in Jesus Christ. Not through spectacle, but through the cross. Not through worldly status, but through love poured out.

As Paul writes, and as we’ll shortly echo in the words of our offertory hymn: “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Amen.

Easter Day by Fr Jack

20th April 2025

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

It is a great joy to celebrate Easter together. If you’ve been here every day this week as we have journeyed through the drama of Holy Week, and if you have come to St Giles’ or to church at all, for the first time ever this morning, and everything in between: 

we have made it, together, to the empty tomb. 

And here - in today’s Gospel that we have just heard - we meet the women who we have been following all this Holy Week in a series of sermons on the ‘women of the passion’. St Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and, Susanna, and the other women with them. The men have fled, but these women have faithfully come, to the tomb. They have turned up, and thereby become the first apostles of the news that changes the world forever. Christ has risen from the dead. 

His death on the cross was as real and horrific as these women know it to have been, they were there (once again, when most of men had run away). But when Christ died and descended into hell, the chains of death and hell could not keep Him. Instead, He empties hell and abolishes death. By undergoing death, He dismantles it, once and for all. 

Now, when you and I face death, whenever that is (hopefully peacefully in our beds, and after a long and happy life, rather than under the wheels of the Number 18 bus), whenever that is, a way lies open before us, not just from life to death, but on through from death to life. A life that is yet more glorious, more real, and everlasting. Because it is the life we will share with the risen Jesus. The life he inaugurates in His resurrection today.

It is good news… and the women are terrified, St Luke tells us in today’s Gospel. And even the slow witted men, we’re told, finally catch up, and are amazed. St Mark, in his Gospel, has the disciples simply run away in fear. 

And well we might. You and I have had twenty centuries of Easter days to get used to this reality. We sit pretty on this side of centuries of the Early Church working out what this all means, the years of sifting and compiling the Scriptures, the punch-ups at all those third and fourth century Ecumenical Councils as they wrestled with who Jesus really is. A long way down stream as we are now, it all seems rather neat and tidy, this resurrection and the Christian life. It’s all rather cosy and pretty fluffy. That is our first mistake. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. 

These wonderful women, Mary, the mother of Jesus, St Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and, Susanna, and the others with them. They have it right. We should be terrified and amazed.

If our relationship with the risen Jesus is comfortable or fluffy or predictable, then it isn’t with the risen Jesus that we are in relationship.

‘Why do you look for the living among the dead?’ The dazzling angels tell them in today’s Gospel. The dead of the tombs, but also the sepulchres of our expectations, our prejudices, the God we think we do or don’t believe in. The challenge is to look beyond those carcasses, and towards the One who is. 

The Christian community, this bizarre body of people Jesus collected together, these women among them, and the millions, billions of people who have followed in their footsteps: we call it the Church, but it is simply the rag tag band of humans who have gathered around the risen Jesus for the last couple of millennia. Those who have been baptized into His death and resurrection, who have feasted on His life in Holy Communion, and tried, often in vain, to work out how we are to live as a result. 

The church isn’t really an institution or an organisation, it is a bizarre global family of people, still reeling (with these women today) at the news that Jesus is risen, and what this means for us and for all that God has made.

To be a Christian is to be a member of this ragtag band, still reeling. Still reeling from today’s events, and in terror and amazement, to be open to the adventure that lies at the heart of the Christian life. And every little parish church across the world in the heartbeat of prayer, in worship, in community (with all its joys and pettinesses), in reading the Bible together and finding our lives vibrantly anchored in the stories of Scripture, in regular and purposeful reception of Holy Communion, in all these things and more we become more and more our true selves. Together, living towards death and resurrection, every day, an adventure with God.

This Easter Day, and every day between today and next Easter we continue this joyful, terrifying and wonderful pilgrimage together, following Jesus, who has gone before us, and is leading us on.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

The Great Vigil of Easter by Fr Jack

19th April 2025

At 'early dawn', St Luke’s Gospel tells us, the women came to the tomb. 'Early dawn'. 

I am told the Rabbis judge the end of day and the start of night, and vice versa by whether you can tell the difference between blue and black. And in the sky, those first shades of blue, not quite pitch black anymore, and we come with these women of the passion, with the Myrrh-bearers, to the tomb. There’s us, with St Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and, Susanna, and the other women with them. We come bearing myrrh, to give as much dignity as possible to our beloved Jesus, even though all our hopes have died with Him. A loving desperation brings us here.

And we find that in the quiet hours of this night, not with trumpets and flashes of fire, but quietly, in the middle of the night, unnoticed, Jesus has slipped out of the tomb. There is enough for a lifetime’s meditation here, but just a couple of thoughts for this night from these wonderful Myrrh-bearers.

Jesus does not rise at dawn, He rises alone in the night, and when we come at dawn, we find Him already risen. Sometimes it is in the midst of our deepest darkness, whether we know it or not, that God is working resurrection miracles in our midst. We just need to hang around long enough to see them. And that’s what we learn from these women of the passion tonight. 

What is a Christian? (That seems a very good question to ask on this night of all nights.)

Well, if we learn from these women, the first to hear of Jesus’ resurrection, then Christians are people who turn up. Christians turn up, and give God room to do wonders.

It’s about God, not really about us.

No matter how little or much we believe, how little or much we love, or know. We turn up, and let God do wonders of belief and love and wisdom and all the rest, in us.

Even in the darkness - in whatever shape or form that darkness takes, in us or around us - in the footsteps of the Myrrh-bearers we just keep turning up, and let God be God.

A short while ago we heard all those wonderful lessons, at the Vigil in St Alphage ruins, from Genesis to Jesus. It has been a long journey to get here. From the creation of Genesis, lots of twists and turns (to say the least!) in between, until we reach now, the new creation, of equal magnitude with the first: the new creation that is the Resurrection of Jesus. It is into this resurrection life that we have entered through baptism, and that you, Eucalyptus/Yakuri and Sophie are entering tonight. 

Death and sin are put behind us, and life in God forever is made our destiny, and the destiny of all things with us. The whole cosmos is renewed and redeemed in Christ tonight, who has died, emptied hell, defeated death and risen again. A new creation.

And He has come to meet us. And we are here to meet Him, because we have followed these women, who turn up. And we will spend the rest of our days turning up, in prayer, in worship, in regular and purposeful receiving of Holy Communion, in acts of faith, hope and love, at home, in work and school, in church, when we are alone, and we we’re in a crowd, with friend and stranger. 

We turn up to meet the Risen Christ, to be surprised by angels, and to find the million different ways in which Jesus goes before us, calling us, joyfully, to follow Him.

Good Friday by Fr Jack

18th April 2025

Good Friday 1 of 3

The first of our women of the passion for today - St Mary Magdalene.

She is something of a mystery. Her name, Mary of the Tower (for that’s what Magdala means) makes her sound more like a City church than a first century Palestinian woman. There is a town called Magdala down the coast of the Sea of Galilee from Capernaum, but that’s not straightforward, I’m told, as a means of identifying her. And what about the very effective smear campaign against St Mary over the centuries, that she was a prostitute. So often in Christian history, men have required women to be either holy virgin nuns, or prostitutes; anything outside these two categories, too confusing, too much.

And then there’s the very direct confusion of which Mary are we talking about here? Is it Mary Magdalene that is afflicted by the evil spirits, a women of ill-repute? Is she the Mary who bathes Jesus’ feet with her hair? Or is that Mary of Bethany? Or are these both other Mary’s? There are no shortage of Mary’s keeping company with Jesus: His mother, her sister, the mother of James and John, the wife of Cleopas, the Magdalene, and others.

It may well be one of those questions that wasn’t a question at all to the Early Church who wrote and read the Gospels: they new these women, as we know our own aunts and uncles, even the ones we never met.

But you and I are left scratching our heads…

And in this, St Mary Magdalene herself points the way. 

Our faith is not a puzzle that needs solving, or binning if the puzzle is ‘broken’ because a solution is not forthcoming. We do not leave our brains at the door when we come to church, far from it. A spirit of intellectual adventure, of rigour, and enquiry are all essential aspects of our faith. Great Christian philosophers and scientists of many different disciplines show us this. 

But whilst not being a puzzle that needs solving, our faith is a mystery. And none more so than the Cross of Jesus we come to today. A mystery, as with all of our faith, that we do not get to lean over and interrogate from above, like a lab assistant poking a sample on the workbench, but one in which we live and move and have our being. This mystery is our lives, and the God with whom we are called into relationship. Real messy, lively, relationship.

And this is where St Mary Magdalene shows us the way. We don’t decode her, we don’t own her, or analyse her, we don’t label her and put her in a box, we join her… this woman of passion, at the feet of Jesus. 

We pour out the nard of our love, at his pierced feet today, we kiss them, and wipe them with our hair. Not because our love or faith or knowledge is sufficient. Not because we have all the answers, and everything neatly sorted out in our heads, but because He has loved us first and last, and will never let us go. 

Very shortly, you will be able to simply come forward and kiss the feet of Jesus. Egeria, who we heard about on Palm Sunday, describes doing this in Jerusalem with a piece of the True Cross, held by the deacons 17 centuries ago. Here today we have a simple wooden cross. You’re invited, when the time comes, to kneel or bow, to kiss, to caress. And a little while after that, you will be invited again to receive Jesus in Holy Communion. 

Such demonstrative and definite gestures, such intimacy, don’t always come easily to us. Perhaps we don’t have the passion of an ancient middle eastern woman of fire like St Mary Magdalene. Christina Rossetti will speak of this to us in the third hour, in her poem ‘Good Friday’. She speaks of being a stone, not a sheep, struggling to find the emotion, of struggling to feel a response. Not just think or know, but be in relationship with this man who hangs there for you and for me. Whatever you feel today, great or small, deep or shallow, let it be. And bring whatever you have, whatever is real in you  to Jesus on the Cross today. It is not right or wrong, proper or improper, just bring it.

Because whether you’re feeling like St Mary Magdalene, or you’re really not - it is not we and our feelings or knowledge who provide today. It’s not about us. St Mary Magdalene knows this well. It’s Him. It is not we who’s love saves the world today - it’s His.

Good Friday 2 of 3

The second of our women of the passion - Our Lady, Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

All through his Gospel, the evangelist, St John, calls himself the ‘Beloved Disciple’. ‘The Disciple Jesus loved’. St John is thought to have been a very young man when he knew Jesus, and he finally sets down his Gospel, the last to be written (in terms of chronology) after a long life of telling people about Jesus, of travelling the known world, or sharing the stories of Jesus’ ministry, and stewing on them, ruminating and reflecting, and then finally sculpting his masterpiece: this Gospel that bears his name. It was a largely aural culture of course, so actually writing a text wasn’t really a very important thing to do. But I’m very glad he did, for our sakes. 

And the point of all that, is that St John, in describing his own part in the Gospel, in calling himself the disciple whom Jesus loved, is not only describing himself, but you. St Luke has a similar trick. Very often St Luke hides the name of the person in a key moment, a defining interaction, because he wants us to see ourselves in that person’s skin as they speak with Jesus. Like one of those painted wooden boards at seaside towns, where you put your own face in the whole, and become part of the scene. So St John’s Beloved Disciple is always him, always you, and always the whole church community represented in that moment in the events of the Gospel. A personification of us all, if you like. At the Last Supper, last night, we, the beloved disciple rest our head on Jesus’ chest. We will run with St Peter to the tomb on Easter morning.

And here, as we heard a short while ago in the Passion narrative: we stand with the women at the foot of the cross: ‘Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.’ The sermons this week have been held together by a theme ‘women of passion: women of the Passion’. Well more than any others, here they are, quite literally. The women at the foot of the cross. 

I love our east window, but the stylised cross, and the very composed Mary and John either side don’t really encapsulate this moment. And we, the beloved disciple see it all as it is. The stinking rubbish heap, Golgotha. Who knows how many criminals have been crucified here before, and how much of them is left rotting, amongst scavenging animals and pests and flies. 

It isn’t the nails that most likely kill the crucified, but as His body crumples, unable to support its own weight, He suffocates, His lungs unable to fill. He probably loses control of His bladder and bowels too. And He probably didn’t have a tasteful white loin cloth. He was naked. Which makes it even more humiliating when, as I am told sometimes probably happened, the blood and body doing strange things, the crucified might well have got a random erection. 

It is not stylised. It is awful. It is sad and humiliating and inhuman. And the women, standing with us, manage somehow to remain. Well, not somehow. They are there because they love Him, and because He loves them. 

That is why we are here today. Because He loves us. Because we love Him. Our love for Him comes in so many different shapes and sizes. It is not always an easy love, not always constant, sometimes hard to put into words. Sometimes our love for God, is simply trying to love God, or wanting to love God. It’s messy and complicated. But then everything that is real in this life is messy and complicated. You cannot find a messier and more fraught reality than the awful one before us today. And our Jesus does not turn back from this confusing, humiliating mess. Nor will He from us and our mess.

I cannot imagine what is going through our minds on that hill outside the City walls on that day. What are they - the Marys and the others - thinking? What are they feeling? What are they saying? Where do we go from here? How long do we have to stay? And how could we leave?

And then Jesus speaks to us. To His beloved disciple, and through St John, to all Christians. Remember the Beloved Disciple represents us and all Christians when He appears in the Gospel. So Jesus speaks to us, to the whole church, as He speaks to St John. And from the Cross, He lovingly tells us what to do:

‘When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’

 27  Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.’

The Lord gives us to His mother Mary, and Mary to us. What does that mean for us? Well it means that every parent who has lost a child; every person who has cared for a love one, and perhaps watched them suffer, and even die; every person who has cried out to God with Mary’s Magnificat to bring down the mighty and lift up the lowly in places of exploitation and oppression; every scared teenager like Mary when Gabriel appeared to her and told her of her pregnancy; every person who feels loneliness like Mary must have felt loneliness at the foot of the cross…all those people and so many more, will never be alone. 

Mary is with them, because St John, we, take her home with us from the cross. Whenever you leave church today, do just this.

Good Friday 3 of 3

We’ve just heard again the haunting and magnificent antiphon from the Anglican Benedictine Sisters at St Mary’s Abbey at West Malling in Kent. Cloistered away, day by day, they are the beating heart of the church and the whole human family. They pray with us and for us, hidden in the wounds of Christ on our behalf. And we out here, on theirs. Just as St Paul says, some are the hands, some the eyes, some the heart etc.

Ann Griffiths, a young unknown welsh girl wrote the most wonderful poetry. Bishop Rowan Williams has translated some of it, but says the English misses so much. But even so, the poem we have just heard: ‘Under the dark trees’ - under perhaps the dark shadow of the cross, Jesus waits. In His beauty and power, in His suffering and loneliness. And carries us ‘over the sea’, she writes. The Israelites escaped Egypt through the sea of reeds, we pass through death itself, into the promised land of His Kingdom, in the arms of Jesus, thanks to what He has done today. And all our ‘masks and fetishes’, Ann Griffiths tells us, fall away, and it is just Him, the real Him, and the real me. Just as St Paul writes to the Corinthians, when we shall see face to face, fully know, and be fully known, for the first time.

The sisters at West Malling spend the decades of their lives, waiting on God, waiting to ‘see Him standing’ there, as Ann Griffiths writes. The Sisters wait with a singleness of heart and a particularity of focus that their Religious Life makes possible. Some of us here may be called to such a life. But most of us are not called to the cloister. But all of us, in our own and different ways, all of us are called to know, to love, and to share Jesus. To know Him, but not just to know Him, but to love Him and rejoice in being loved by Him, but not just for me, I to love Him, but to share that love with all the world. 

The final women of the passion today, maybe are you and me, and the women and men of this parish - all who live, work, study or spend their time here - the beautiful children of God (each and every one of the them) for whom Jesus dies today, whether they know it or not.

As we heard nearly two hours ago now in the Letter to the Hebrews, ‘Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. 

Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.’

We are shortly to leave this place. Jesus is dead. There is nothing more to be done. 

But even then, while we wander off, wondering what to do with a day that is so strange and sad. And rightly so. Our Jesus our ‘friend’, as Ann Griffiths calls Him. ‘The friend of guilt and helplessness’, as we spend the rest of the day, He sinks below, into hell, and even there, even in the very depths, His life will overcome. Dark death, even now, is being destroyed, death’s chains and shackles are melting away, hell’s power, dissolved. And our Jesus cannot be stopped. It is only just beginning.

Poems

Good Friday

By Christina Rossetti

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

I saw him standing 

By Ann Griffiths (1776— 1805)

Translated by Bishop Rowan Williams

Under the dark trees, there he stands,
there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes?
I thought I knew a little
how he compels, beyond all things, but now
he stands there in the shadows. It will be
Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning,
when I shall wake to see him as he is.

He is called Rose of Sharon, for his skin
is clear; his skin is flushed with blood,
his body lovely and exact; how he compels
beyond ten thousand rivals. There he stands
my friend, the friend of guilt and helplessness,
To steer my hollow body over the sea.

The earth is full of masks and fetishes,
What is there here for me? Are these like him?
Keep company with him and you will know:
no kin, no likeness to those empty eyes.
He is a stranger to them all, great Jesus.
What is there here for me?
I know what I have longed for Him to hold me always.

'Spy Wednesday' Holy Wednesday by Fr Jack

16th April 2025

Today is traditionally called Spy Wednesday, after Temple Tuesday yesterday and Fig Monday. They take their names from the Gospel in the medieval lectionary, preserved in the Book of Common Prayer, for each of these days. The fig tree cursed because it doesn’t bear fruit. Jesus turning tables in the Temple. And today, Judas the spy, the betrayer.

It is that Gospel reading, too, in the modern lectionary we follow, for today. And Simon Peter is there, faithful and true. St John, who writes these words, is there, literally leaning on Jesus’ heart. And Judas so easily becomes a ‘panto’ villain. But this won’t do. Judas is too easily distanced and condemned, if we treat him like a panto villain, because we are all capable of being Judas.

And it is today’s woman of the passion who shows us that. She’s not in today’s Gospel. She won’t come ‘on stage’ until tomorrow night. But it is she who makes this point for us. She is today’s ‘Woman of the Passion’ (our theme for this year’s HW sermons). The servant girl who will ask St Peter: ‘You were with Jesus, the Galilean?’ (S. Matt. 26.69) ) And St Peter makes the first of three denials. 

Judas may have betrayed Him. But the servant girl’s question leads to St Peter abandoning Jesus when He needed Him most.

But what was that servant girl’s life like? Was she funny or clever? What tasks filled her day? Who did she love? What did she most enjoy about life? We will never know. But there she is at the heart of history. Sadly nameless, and faceless, yes. But Jesus loves her too. He has come to be her saviour… does she know?

Her life is lost amongst the shouting men of this night - St Peter’s shouts, soldiers, chief priests, and crowds. 

History is almost always written by and about so-called ‘great men’, but this girl, this (quote, unquote) ’small’ life is here caught up in the events that will change everything, forever. Truly historic events, quite above battles and empires, elections and the rest. 

Even if the servant girl’s life was the only life ever to have been, if she was the sum total of humanity, Jesus would gladly give His life for her. Even if you or I were the only person ever to have been, Jesus would give His life.

We bring our lives, whether they feel big or small into this week.

This servant girl was quite possibly more bothered about water that needed fetching, fires tending, food cooking, difficult customers handling.

We bring our confusion and distractedness. Our busyness, and every part of ourselves into this week. It may not be conformable or convenient. It may not seem to fit.

We even bring our denials and betrayals. The times we have not spoken up for Jesus, when we have chosen the easier, less truthful, less real path. The times when we have worshipped other, lesser things.

And we bring all these things, and still Jesus loves us, and still He gives His life for us. 

There is only once difference between Judas and St Peter when you get down to it. Judas hangs himself in despair. St Peter, on the other hand, waits long enough for Jesus - risen - to come to Him and ask Him, three times (one for each denial) ‘Do you love me?’. And Peter responds, and Jesus uses Peter to change the world. One despairs, the other lives long enough for Jesus to get at him, and changing him, change the world.

I wonder if the servant girl ever found out what happened next?

'Temple Tuesday' Holy Tuesday by Fr Jack

15th April 2025

‘Sir, we would see Jesus’. Those wonderful words of the Greeks to Phillip. There are some marvellous old pulpits with those words carved in the top to remind the preacher as s/he stands there what exactly they are there for! Marvellous words. 

But that is a distraction from our Holy Week theme of ‘Women of the Passion’? Today’s Gospel has no women! Philip and Andrew etc. All men, of course. So how do they fit into this Holy Week’s theme of ‘Women of the Passion’? Maybe some of the Greeks were women, but we aren’t told. In fact this is not a ‘problem’.

Because, partly, it is good to notice the absence of women in this Gospel passage, like so many Gospel passages. And yet we know that it was women who bankrolled Jesus’ ministry - St Luke tells us that. And we know that some of Jesus’ most loved and closest friends were women - all the Evangelists tell us that. And this week of all weeks, we know that it will be the women, who with St John (who writes today’s Gospel) wait with Jesus at the end, on stinking, horrific Golgotha, when all others have fled. And it will be them, who meet Him Risen, because they are there, there because of love, which keeps them there, when the men have run away. 

And there’s even something of that in today’s Gospel, despite the lack of women’s names and voices. Because today’s Gospel speaks of the cost of life. The grain of wheat that rends itself, gives itself away in order to give life. This agricultural image of Jesus death and resurrection, is one that these men don’t seem to understand.

Not all women experience childbirth of course, (and parking the fact that it is ridiculous for me to speak about this, having absolutely no knowledge or understanding of this subject!), but there is something of that spirit, of the pain and cost of a woman’s body in this image Christ lays before us today.

The cross is a kind of birth. It is new life, the New Life, for all creation, but at such cost. Just as TS Eliot’s Magi in his poem, wonder if Christ’s birth at Bethlehem was indeed a birth or a death. So this death is the most awful imaginable, and a kind of birth. 

I heard a sermon once in which the preacher, a priest and an academic, who happened also to be a woman said ‘who but the Blessed Virgin Mary really knows the cost of saying what the priest says at every Eucharist when s/he lifts up the host before Holy Communion: ’Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Blessed are those who are called to his supper’. She knows what that cost Him, and she gave Him the flesh and blood, the life which He gives away. The seed dying in the ground. 

The cost of life.

The tomb in which Mary and the other Myrrh-bearers lay Him is, by God’s grace, by the unstoppable power of His life and love, become a womb in which the new and eternal life of the whole universe is brought to birth. Jesus the first fruits of this new life, we and all things, who will follow after Him.

It’s all there. It’s all there. And it is Good News, but we cannot turn our eyes away from how much it costs. Our Lady Mary and the others did no turn away, and nor must we.

Footnote: Mthr Esther Brazil

'Fig Moday' Holy Monday by Fr Jack

14th April 2025

Mary and the nard: St John's Gospel 12.1-11

In today’s Gospel, Jesus comes to spend time with his friends. With His friends.

We so often talk about marriage as if it was the only or highest form of Christian relationship. ‘Christ and His bride the church’ (Ephesians 5.22), the prominent place of the sacrament of marriage in the Church’s life, and the culture that has grown up around marriage in Christendom as we have received it.

But here, on this Monday in Holy Week - as the rubber hits the road in so many ways - we are reminded that that must never be allowed to obscure, or devalue the holy gift of friendship. 

Blood is thicker than water, you may say. There’s (tier A) ‘family’ and then (tier B) ‘friends’. But this is not the way the Saviour lives or shows us. Again and again He comes simply to hang out with Ss Mary, Martha and Lazarus. This gang of siblings that are His friends. We read His visits, and focus on things like Lazarus’ resurrection, Mary’s nard. And we should, they’re important! But we mustn’t lose sight on the friendship in which all this happens.

The Hebrew word Hesed is translated (not fulsomely enough in English) as something like ‘loving-kindness’. It is one of the essential and defining characteristics of God in the Old Testament. God is loving kindness, hesed. 

This word is used in relationships like Naomi and Ruth, these two women, friends, both widows, mother and daughter-in-law, who fall on hard times. And Naomi releases Ruth from her bond as daughter-in-law (Ruth 1.11). Ruth stays because of her love, her loving-kindness, hesed, her friendship with Naomi. And by using the same hesed for that relationship, as for God, we see something beautiful and true; something that can be so easily overlooked, or said cheaply, without noticing the depth of what we are saying. It’s there in Ruth and Naomi. It’s there in Jesus’ visit today to Ss Mary and Martha and Lazarus.

What do these women of the passion have to teach us?

God’s way of being is friendship. God offers us friendship. God desires our friendship. God is our friend. God desires us to share friendship, and shows us the way. Deep, loving, real, holy friendship, is at the heart of the Christian life. It isn’t a triviality, it speaks of God’s nature and God’s call on our life. 

Jesus lavishes His short time on earth amongst His friends, as He does so today. With this little family in the Gospel today, and with us.

'I no longer call you servants, but friends’ (St John 15.15). ‘Ye are my friends’ (St John 15.14)

Footnote: Fr Steffan Mathias

Lent III

Mothering Sunday by Dorothy Webster

30th March 2025

It is surely not possible for the created to have a gift that the creator does not have.  God is the greatest musician.  My achievements as a musician are miniscule, but I have served music in other ways.

I grew up in a village near Whitehaven, a small town on the cumbrian coast.  My parents were not musical or rich but when I was ten there was a miracle.  A beautiful baby brand piano came to our semi-detached house.  My elder sister, 16 years older than me, played hymns when she visited.  The long stool was full of printed music.  With this, for 7 years, I taught myself to play.  There were no teachers.

One day in Sunday School, I had to say a long Psalm by heart.  My reward was a bible.

The only live music was singing hymns in Chapel.  My favourites were “Eternal Father Strong to Save” and “All Things Bright and Beautiful”.  As a storm arrived from the sea, 2 miles away, I prayed for those in peril.  I knew the purple headed mountains at Wastwater.  God was in the beauty of nature and its power.  

I sang in the senior school choir with joy.   My uncle, who was the only person we knew with a wind up gramophone and six records paid for my singing lessons with a kind elderly gentleman, Mr James Bond.  In 1952 he entered me into the Whitehaven Festival.  The adjudicators were Michael Head and Eric Thimas, both professors at the Royal Academy of Music.  They encouraged me.  Miracle No 2, I became a student at the Academy from 1954-1957.

I was 18 when I arrived in London, a nobody knowing nothing, but I had May Blyth as my singing teacher.  She found my soprano voice.  I had never heard an orchestra so sat in all the rehearsals.  I sang in the large mixed voice choir.  For me the biggest thrill was to sing Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony with full orchestra.  The great composer came to our last rehearsal and was pleased.  For these Academy years and many more Michael Head and Eric Thiman became my dear friends.  Each wrote a song for me.

In his early 50s Eric Thiman began a ministry of music to the congregation of the City Temple, the only free church in the City of London.  He did this for the rest of his life.

The church on Holborn Viaduct  was destroyed in the blitz.  The people were bombed out of 8 churches and 1950 were sharing a building near Marble Arch.  The minister Dr Lesley Weatherhead went on a lecture tour of America to raise funds for the rebuild.  In New York he stayed with Mr and Mrs Rockafella who gave him a cheque for $50,000 dollars.  Eric designed the organ for the new church which was opened by the Queen Mother in October 1958.  Doctor Weatherhead was the first Doctor of Divinity to also be a fully qualified Psychiatrist.  In rooms at the top of the building he had a clinic for any one in mental distress.  He wrote 20 books and had a great sense of humour.  His inspirational sermons were often punctuated with laughter.  Jesus became alive to me and I became a church member.  The 30 singers of the choir were led by a professional quartet.  For 7 years I was the soprano.

In 1963 Miracle No 3.  I married William David Webster, Principle Double Bass of the LPO.  Our 3 daughters arrived punctually.  From leaving the Academy I had always taught in schools, starting choirs.  Now I had a break but sang in the church choir whenever possible.  Eric Thiman died in 1975.  The church needed an assistant organist.  An incredibly gifted, beautiful young lady was appointed.  Anne Marsden Thomas.

My husband Bill Webster was the servant of the world's greatest music.  Every time he put the bow on the string was the best he could do.  The orchestra went on long foreign tours, Northern Europe, Russia, India, China, Hong Kong, Japan x 2, Australia x 2, America x 3.  At home there were concerts in the Festival Hall, recordings, proms, Edinburgh Festival, and for the 3 months in the summer Glyndebourne Opera.  For many years he was Vice Chairman of the Orchestra and Fellow of the Royal College of Music where he taught.  My main job was to look after him and our family, but I taught for 10 years in a small Catholic school for girls where some of my colleagues were nuns.  Sister Laura and I enjoyed discussing our faith.

My spiritual home was a church in Bromley.  The organist, my friend, Derek Williams.  When cathedral choirs have a holiday, they must be replaced.  Derek had a special group of singers who did this.  He invited me to join them.  We sang at Durham (my favourite), Ripon, York Minster, Worcester, Ely (my favourite) and Canterbury.  For many years we did repeated visits.  To sing in those glorious buildings was awe inspiring and food for the soul.

In April 1989 Bill and I went to Madeira for a weeks holiday before Glyndebourne rehearsals started.  As usual he went for a swim in the sea.  There he had a heart attack and died.  The memorial service was full of kind words and beautiful music.  I have a book in which great conductors, artists, members of the orchestra and ordinary people wrote of their shock and sorrow at Bill’s death.

I was in a dark place.  Bromley needed a new shopping mall.  My church was rubble.  Now Miracle No 4.  Anne came to see me and invited me to join her singers at St Giles as an unpaid 2nd soprano.  I did this for 20 years with joy.  To work with Anne again was incredible.  I was surrounded by loving kindness.  Kirstie the soprano and Suzanne the alto are still my dear friends.

I started a new career training individual singers for concerts and competitions.  I was invited to become the conductor of Beckenham Ladies Choir.  This small group gave hour long concerts to church groups and care homes.  With time and training the numbers doubled.  Full of confidence they became ambitious.  2 evening concerts and a Christmas concert in the large parish church were added to the diary.  These concerts were a platform for performances by gifted instrumentalists.  Each concert raised £1,000 for charity.  We did this for many years.

I had been a widow for 7 years when I married Ken Thomas.  He was Welsh, had a fine baritone voice and a sense of humour.  We had a beautiful service in St Giles and Ken joined me in the family home.

I was busy in my later years.  Cathy my eldest daughter and 4 years later, Amanda my youngest daughter both came home to have their babies.  I was the happiest hands-on-granny ever, but I kept my commitment to the singers, the choir and Ken who died in 2017.

At the beginning of lockdown I asked mezzo Emily Gray and her accompanist Nicole Johnson to record songs by Michael Head and Eric Thiman as my thanks to them for my life in music.

Michael Head composed 100 songs.  “The Ships of Arcady” was published before he became a piano student at the Academy.  10 years later he was a professor of piano, being sent all over the world as an examiner for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music.  He also gave masterclasses and recitals of his songs, singing to his own accompaniment.  Many of Michael’s songs have been recorded but non of Eric’s 50 songs have been.  The two written for me are on the list, but my favourite is “The Silver Swan”, Eric’s perfect setting of a short anonymous poem.

The Silver Swan, who living had no note

When death approached unlocked her silent throat

Leaning her breast against the reedy shore

Thus sang her first and last and sang no more

Farewell all joys, O Death come close mine eyes

More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise

I asked Amanda, my daughter, a professional artist to paint the portrait of the swan for the cover.  The record is available from streaming sites and Convivium records.

Tomorrow I will be playing the piano when Margaret comes to sing.

My bible is valiantly trying to keep its hard covers on.

And this morning, as always, my dear Anne, Elizabeth, Penny, Amanda, Robin and Louis have given me a vision of the beauty that will be my heaven.

Lent II 2025 16th March 2025 by Peter

‘Naming sin’

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. 

Once upon a time, many years ago, in a land far, far away, my senior year English teacher, a bearded Shakespearean with long hair, named Dr. Gideon Rappaport, asked the class to memorise the seven deadly sins: Pride, Avarice, Lust, Wrath, Envy, Gluttony, and Sloth. 

An inquisitive blonde girl asked why we weren’t memorising the seven saintly virtues instead. Dr. Rapp replied with an impish smile we recognised as a precursor to scholarly or moral condescension, “You’re far more likely to commit the sins than over-exercise the virtues.” 

Needless to say, our sophomoric high school selves were a little offended. 

But looking back on my twenties and thirties in New York City and London, I can say with certainty that Dr. Rapp was right. 

My life seemed good—engaging work, a vibrant social life, and experiences novel enough to inspire a book. Yet much of it was driven by the sins encouraged by culture and commerce. 

Pride, Avarice, Lust, Wrath, Envy, Gluttony, and Sloth. 

It wasn’t until my early forties, during the second lockdown, that I understood the depth of their hold on me. As the days grew shorter and nights darker, I fell into gluttony and lust personally, while pride, envy, wrath—and avarice—wracked me professionally, in part due to the uncertainty we all faced in the pandemic, and in part due to my own shortcomings. 

I was left sleepless, anxious, and unable to think or breathe. 

At my lowest, I convinced myself the only escape was to end it all. I planned which knife to use, and where to leave notes to protect my cleaner from discovering my body. 

Ironically, that specific, tangible planning helped me sleep deeply for the first time in weeks. And in that sleep, I dreamt vividly ... of angels. 

Not the harp-strumming, robe-wearing angels. These were Isaiah angels - heads floating on wings, surrounded by a sea of fire that engulfed us all. They were awesome. And one of them spoke to me. They told me, I shouldn’t kill myself, because I hadn’t yet realised my purpose. I asked what my purpose was. They smiled and said nothing. I took it as a challenge to live and find out. 

Now, let me be perfectly clear - I had never before dreamt of angels. And I have never, since. 

But when I woke the next morning, I realised just how absurd it would be to throw my life away over something as trivial as a job. 

Still, my suffering was undeniable. I couldn’t read, watch TV, or engage with the world. Sometimes I could scroll Instagram nervously and aimlessly. But during three weeks of medical leave, I felt outside of society, a madman looking at sane people from his own private asylum. 

Through God’s grace and artificial intelligence, an Instagram ad I had never seen before saved me. It was for a meditation app called FitMind. And FitMind became a lifeline. Slowly, five minutes at a time, I observed that I was not the anxiety caused by pride, envy, wrath, gluttony or lust. I simply was. I existed, apart from the chaos of life. 

As my practice deepened, I began exploring a form of meditation that aims at sitting in perfect awareness and love. It opened my heart to a new understanding of myself. Despite that progress, I still felt stuck in old patterns. At a friend’s suggestion, I attended a retreat in the South Downs, where I named and confronted inherited patterns of behaviour —cycles I repeated but could choose to break, if I wanted. Through this, I discovered the “quadrinity”: the idea that we’re comprised of four parts - body, intellect, emotions, and spiritual self. I learned that I had ignored my spiritual self—the part of me that is inherently perfect and loved—as I had focused on my life of humanism and hedonism - fuelled by intellect, body and emotion. 

Returning from the retreat, I tried to nurture my spiritual self and attended St. Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday. During the liturgy, as the congregation confessed their sins, I was overwhelmed. I cried, not because I fully understood sin or Christianity or had an epiphany, but because I wanted to break free from the patterns that held me captive. I prayed to become the person I was meant to be. 

I kept returning to St. Pauls, and one fine day in May, I heard a sermon by their chaplain, Paula Hollingsworth. As I recall it, she said, “To be a Christian is to love God and accept Jesus as your saviour, and to love your neighbour as yourself. If anyone tells you the Bible encourages hate or judgment, they are wrong.” 

How could I not want to join a faith grounded in pure love, for God, for others and for myself? 

Paula became my instructor and guide, and a year later, I was baptised and confirmed. Several months after that, she encouraged me to join St. Giles. This welcoming congregation, led by our wonderful Father Jack, Deacon Lucy and Father Edwin in our weekly rhythms, has become central to my spiritual journey. 

I continue to meditate on the relationship between love, sin, God, others and myself. I believe I am good, created by the breath of God, loved by God and worthy of love, including my own. I believe we all are. But sometimes I allow sin to distract from that love, from that goodness. 

Naming sin - those negative patterns, Pride, Avarice, Lust, Wrath, Envy, Gluttony and Sloth - helps me turn away from it, step by step, little by little, and become more myself. More capable of loving and being loved. 

And when I do, it’s like I’m standing on a solid rock, as the tide ebbs and flows around me, and the waves lap or even crash against me. I’m standing, solid in love and solid in faith. Full of joy, kindness, and peace. At least on good days. 

I try—imperfectly—to carry God’s love into every aspect of my life: family, friendships, work, and community. Worshipping here with you strengthens me on this journey. For that, I am deeply grateful to Paula, Fathers Jack and Edwin, Deacon Lucy, all of you, and, of course, to God. 

And, I pray every day that my spiritual journey may continue: 

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. 

First Sunday of Lent 2025 by Fr Jack

Deuteronomy 26.1-11

St Paul to the Romans 10.8b-13

St Luke 4.1-13

Introduction to the BCP, being used on Sundays in Lent:

In recent years we have come to use the BCP, the Book of Common Prayer, for most Sundays in Lent. The BCP is the English Liturgy, that came into being when Henry VIII took us out of Communion with the European Church. It finally came to settle in the form we have it today in 1662 after the Restoration of the Monarchy after the end of ‘our’ Oliver Cromwell’s Republic. 

(One practical point, apart from standing for the Gospel and for the Creed (and hymns), and sitting for the Epistle (and anthem), the Prayer Book assumes that you basically spend the whole of the service kneeling. Kneeling is a powerful and good posture for prayer, but I realise we may not all do that all the time. That being so, when the Prayer Book says kneel, don’t be tempted just to sit instead, like we’re watching telly. Worship isn’t a spectator sport. Standing and kneeling are equivalent ancient postures for prayer, and much better than sitting (which is also fine, but if we need to). And it doesn’t matter if some are kneeling, some standing, a few sitting because they need to. So be brave, and pray with confidence.)

Anyway, the language of the Prayer Book is beautiful, in its images and rhythms. It has helped the English people be before the Living God for half a millennium. It is also a political and historical text - it holds the space for the new emerging Protestant ideas of the Reformation period, within the Catholic continuity that the Church of England holds too. By using these words, which are still the normative liturgy of the Church of England, we stand in fellowship with the joys and sorrows and everyday of hundreds of years of Christian life in these islands. So whether you love it or loath it, whether you know it off by heart or have never used it before - step into the water of the BCP this Lent at St Giles’ and let it speak of God to your heart, and speak your heart to God.

Sermon:

On this first Sunday in Lent, I want to help us engage with this season of preparation that the Church gives us by speaking about honesty. About honesty, about sin, and about prayer.

Prayer, fasting and almsgiving are the traditional three-fold practices for Lent.

Deuteronomy today points to the honesty that lies at the heart of almsgiving. God’s ancient people the Jews are instructed in the Law to offer generously of their bounty to God. Not as some great act of self-sacrifice and virtue, but simply because everything they have, everything they are (as a people freed form slavery and lead into safety and prosperity together) is a gift from the Lord. ‘All things come from you, and of your own have we given you’ (as the Book of Chronicles has it, and as the priest prays over the collection during the Parish Eucharist).

To give generously to church and other charities is a simple act of honesty, of recognising that life is never really an act of self-making, however hard we work or talented we are. That all things, including our talents and energy and will, are a gift from God to be grateful for, and to share.

Honesty with ourselves and God really is at the heart of the Christian life.

It’s the same spirit in which St Paul speaks today to the little fledgling church in Rome. What we confess with our lips we hold in our hearts. We don’t believe ‘these’ things over here, in this little box called ‘work’ or ‘church’ or ‘home’, and then live ‘these’ completely different realities over here, called ‘home’ or ‘work’ or ‘church’. No, we are seeking to live honest lives, whole lives, with integrity. And a part of that integrity is being honest about God and us. That life is a gift (as Deuteronomy says), and we are called to live that way, in the way we are generous, and in every other kind of knock on effect.

And that’s what Jesus is doing in the Wilderness today. He is showing us (and finding for Himself as He prepares to embark upon His public ministry) that integrity of belief of practice, that wholeness of being. In those threefold temptations, the devil tempts Him with comfort, power, and a lack of consequences. And Jesus says ‘no’ to all those. Instead, He chooses to face the reality of the road ahead, not those short-cuts of comfort, power and a lack of consequences. 

Honesty, integrity, wholeness. What we think life is, and how we actually live life coming together in a mutually supportive and illuminating whole. That’s the message of today’s readings, it is a very good charter for Lent I think, and indeed, its kind of what our whole lives are about. Who are we? What are we for? How then shall we live? And asking those questions with God bravely, with honesty and integrity.

And that brings me neatly to sin and prayer. 

Sin. Hellfire preachers who go on about sin. History has had its fill of those. And the trouble is, they’ve queered the pitch for the real thing. Because we are liable to flinch when we are talked at about sin. But its really important to speak of sin, we just have to reclaim it, for a deep, thoughtful, orthodox and ancient Christian faith. Sin is anything that separates us from love. The love of God, neighbour (and self, because we will not love our neighbours much, loving our neighbours as ourselves, if we cannot love our selves). Sin is anything that digs a ditch or builds a wall between us loving God, or what God has made. And the truth is that we are all sinners. Not just the people of C Wing of Wormwood Scrubs - we are all sinners. Ever since Adam and Eve, there is something inherent in the human condition that sees us put walls between us and our creator, and our fellow creatures. We can’t shake it, (that’s why we talk about ‘original' sin), but we can be honest about it as we live into and out of our Baptism. We can live with integrity. 

We can face up to those parts of ourselves (our fears or smallness or wounds) that see us build walls or dig ditches, to protect us from the consequences of God’s love, of life truly for and with others. And we are honest about it. That’s why every Eucharist on Sundays and midweek prepares us for Communion with confessing our sins. That’s why private Confession one to one is such a gift to every part of the church (not just Orthodox or Roman Catholics), that’s why we spend time in prayer before God. We carry the needs of the world and the church to God, who knows them already, but invites us to love them with Him. But in prayer we also bring ourselves, to be stripped back a little, like clay in the hand of a potter, to be formed and shaped, and made whole and honest and a little more our true selves before God. As Scripture says, like fire that burns away the impure base metals, leaving gold. That is Lent, that is life.

It’s honest. It’s real about sin. It’s prayer.

And that is the Jesus Prayer, with which I’ll finish. You have it on the Sunday sheet, in a moment we’ll hear the choir sing a beautiful new setting of it, by our own magnificent Amanda Dean, for our intercessions. This prayer is two moments in the Gospel chimera’d together: Blind Bartimeaus and the Publican: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

It has been called the whole Gospel in one line. This prayer honestly says who God is, and it says who we are. It isn’t a self-hating, revelling in sinfulness like some ugly Victorian bully. It is an honest, and freedom-bringing acceptance of our createdness, and our human condition. It honestly and wonderfully says to God, ‘God, I know I pretend to myself and others all the time, but actually, I do know that I cannot be my true self under my own power. I know that I cannot do life, by myself. I know that I cannot earn my way to heaven. I need you, help me. And I trust that you are with me. Thank you’. God’s mercy, His patient, loving, transforming life permeates us more and more every time these words pass our lips, or roll over the front of our minds. That’s why orthodox christians often mutter these words on loop, hour after hour. I’ve said it before, but neuroplasticity is our friend. The more we look at people suspiciously or possessively, in person or online, the more and more and more we will instinctively do that. The more we come honestly before God in prayer, the more we will find we strengthen those pathways in our brain, and those instincts in the way we live. We use habit to cultivate, like attending to a garden, that brings forth more and more and more fruit. 

Two final little thoughts, which I hope are helpful. Lots of people who use the Jesus Prayer find they sing it - as we will today. People also breathe it. Splitting the phrase into four: 1. Breathe in slowly ‘Lord Jesus Christ. 2. Breathe out slowly ‘Son of God’. 3. Breathe in slowly ‘Have mercy of me’. 4. Breathe out slowly ‘a sinner’. Try that for just a few minutes now.

And finally, as I said, the words of the Jesus Prayer are about honesty and liberation towards joy, not wallowing in self-hate. They are also not about ‘me’. The ‘have mercy on me, a sinner’ to our modern western eyes might seem a little self-regarding. But remember, these are ancient and eastern words. The Eastern tradition of the church is quite clear: whenever we pray, we bring the whole of the church, the whole of the human family, the whole of the cosmos with us before the Throne of Grace. The Jesus Prayer, is always an ‘us’ prayer, not a me, me, me, prayer.

So, the Jesus Prayer is an ancient gift which I commend to you this Lent, and for life. Take it with you into periods of silent prayer at home or in church, take it with you on the tube, take it with you into the transitions between meetings, or the snatched seconds between phone calls or zoom calls. It’s about honesty, about sin and about prayer. And it will change your life.

Evensong Homily, Sunday before Lent 2025, by Dn Lucy
Exodus 3.1-6 
John 12.27-36a

Our readings today present two distinct encounters with God’s voice - one in a burning bush, the other from heaven itself.

In Exodus, we read:
Moses said, ‘I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.’ And when the Lord saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him.

In John, we hear:
Then came a voice from heaven... The crowd standing there heard it and said that it had thundered; others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him.’ Jesus answered, ‘This voice has come not for my sake but for yours.’

These passages reveal something striking about how God speaks. The bush burns at the wilderness edge, but God does not compel Moses to stop. The voice from heaven speaks, yet some hear only thunder. God invites attention rather than demands it.

Notice the sequence in Exodus: Moses first observes something unusual, then makes a decision to turn aside to see, and only then - when God sees his attentiveness - does God call his name.

Similarly, in John, the same voice reaches different ears with different effects. Some recognise it as an angel speaking, others as mere noise. Jesus emphasises that this voice came for their sake - yet perception varies widely.

As we approach Lent, these readings invite us to cultivate attentiveness. Where might God be quietly present in your life? What gentle promptings might you be dismissing as background noise?

We live in a world of relentless distractions. Perhaps this season calls us to do as Moses did - to step away from our usual routines and turn aside, with curiosity, to what flickers at the edges of our awareness.

When Moses turns aside, he hears God calling his name. He responds simply: “Here am I.” In Hebrew, just one word: Hineni. Present. Available. Listening. It is the same response Samuel and Isaiah give when encountering God - a posture of openness.

Might this be our practice this Lent? To notice what burns without being consumed. To turn aside and pay attention. And when we sense God’s presence, to respond with Moses’ openness: “Here am I.”

Jesus promises that if we walk in the light while we have it, we will become children of light. May we be people who turn aside to see, who listen beyond the thunder, and who respond with open hearts.

Amen.

Sunday before Lent 2025 by Dn Lucy

Exodus 34:29-end

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Luke 9:28 – 43a

Today we stand at a threshold moment in our church calendar. The Transfiguration serves as a bridge between the revelatory season of Epiphany and the penitential journey of Lent. Like Peter, James, and John, we’re about to descend from the mountain of glory into the valley of shadows. But before we do, let’s understand what this magnificent moment teaches us.

One of the gifts in today’s Lectionary readings is how we see one Biblical writer interpreting another. In 2 Corinthians, Paul reflects on the story of Moses’ shining face and finds in it deep meaning for the Christian life. Meanwhile, Luke, in his account of the Transfiguration, echoes and transforms the Exodus story in ways that illuminate both Christ’s identity and our own calling.

Let’s begin with Moses. He descends from Sinai carrying the tablets of the covenant, unaware that his face is shining after his encounter with God. The Israelites react with fear; they cannot bear to look at this reflected glory. Moses responds practically: he wears a veil, removing it only when speaking with God or delivering God’s word.

Paul, however, reinterprets this moment in a startling way. Where Exodus presents the veil as a response to the people’s fear, Paul sees it as a metaphor for spiritual blindness. But in Christ, he tells us, this veil is removed, allowing us to see God’s glory and be transformed by it.

Luke’s account of the Transfiguration deepens this meditation on divine glory. Like Moses, Jesus ascends a mountain, and his appearance is changed. But unlike Moses, whose radiance is a reflection of God’s presence, Jesus’ glory radiates from within. His transfiguration is not the result of an encounter with God but a revelation of his own divine nature (Heb. 1:3: “He is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of his being”).

Moses speaks with God alone, but Jesus converses with Moses and Elijah, revealing Jesus as the fulfilment of both the Law and the Prophets. And they discuss his “exodus” to be accomplished in Jerusalem (Luke 9:31) - a deliberate link between Moses’ deliverance of Israel and Jesus’ greater redemption through the cross.

The disciples react as the Israelites did - overcome with fear. At Sinai, the people begged not to hear God’s voice directly (Exod. 20:19). Peter, James, and John likewise fall silent and afraid. But whereas Moses veiled his face to shield the people from God’s reflected glory, Jesus does not. Instead, a cloud - God’s own presence - overshadows them, and from it God speaks: “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (Luke 9:35).

This moment confirms what was declared at Jesus’ baptism: he is not just another prophet or lawgiver but God’s own Son. And what happens next is just as important. Descending from the mountain, Jesus encounters raw human suffering: a father in despair, a boy possessed by a demon, disciples who cannot help. This stark contrast embodies the very essence of Christ’s mission. This direct move from divine revelation to transformative healing, demonstrates that God’s glory is not simply an aesthetic spectacle to be admired, but a power that reaches into the depths of human pain and need.

As we stand at this threshold between seasons, these readings invite us to witness the transforming power of God’s glory in our own lives. This is a transformation that addresses our fears. The Israelites feared Moses’s shining face; the disciples were terrified on the mountain. Encounter with God is awesome in the truest sense. Yet the Spirit enables us to behold God’s glory without the veil of fear, as we experience that God’s glory transforms rather than destroys.

This transformation also has purpose. Moses’s shining face reflected his encounter with God as mediator of the law. Jesus’s transfiguration revealed his divine nature as he prepared for the path to Jerusalem. Similarly, the Spirit’s transforming work in us equips us for service in God’s kingdom reminding us that glimpses of glory aren’t given for escape but for the Spirit’s empowering work.

What strikes me as particularly moving about the Transfiguration is how the disciples, even in witnessing such glory, struggled to comprehend its meaning. Peter responds by wanting to build dwellings, missing the deeper significance. This pattern of missed recognition runs throughout scripture - those closest to Jesus often struggled to recognise him or understand the significance of what they witnessed. Think of Mary Magdalene at the tomb, mistaking the risen Lord for a gardener. Remember the disciples on the road to Emmaus, walking miles alongside Jesus without recognising him until the breaking of bread. Consider Thomas, needing to touch Christ’s wounds before believing, or the disciples at the Sea of Tiberias, not recognising Jesus on the shore until the miraculous catch of fish.

These moments aren’t recorded to embarrass the disciples but to remind us of a profound truth that Paul articulates in his first letter to the Corinthians: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

This reality of partial vision, of seeing “through a glass darkly” as some translations put it, should instil in us a deep humility about our own spiritual understanding. Even as Paul tells us that we are being transformed into Christ’s image “from one degree of glory to another,” he acknowledges that this transformation is ongoing, incomplete.

How often in our contemporary church life do we forget this? We engage in heated debates about doctrine, liturgy, inclusion, or scriptural interpretation, each side convinced of the absolute clarity of their position. Different Christian factions become entrenched, each certain they alone have the fullness of divine truth.

Today’s Gospel acclamation offers us guidance on the proper posture: “Welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.” Meekness - not a popular virtue in our culture of confident assertions and polarised positions. Yet meekness is precisely what allows us to remain open to further revelation, to the ongoing work of the Spirit in unveiling both God’s glory and our own misconceptions.

As we prepare to enter Lent, perhaps we might take up the spiritual practice of holy uncertainty - making space for questions alongside convictions, for listening as much as proclaiming, for admitting the limits of our vision even as we follow the light we have. For as we journey with unveiled faces, turning toward Christ’s glory even when we comprehend it imperfectly, we are slowly being transformed into that same image - a transformation that comes not from our own spiritual achievement, but “from the Lord, the Spirit.”

The medieval church had a tradition of ‘burying the Alleluia’ during Lent, a recognition that we enter a more sombre season. But they did so having glimpsed the glory that awaits. We too, having seen Christ transfigured, now follow him toward Jerusalem. We journey not from glory to gloom, but as Paul reminds us, “from glory to glory” - even when our understanding remains partial.

In the days ahead, may we carry both the memory of transfiguration glory and the humility of those who know they see imperfectly. May the Spirit transform us for Christ’s mission, equipping us to serve as Jesus did when he descended from the mountain to meet human need. May we follow him through both clarity and uncertainty, trusting that the same Spirit who removes the veil will also guide us home. Amen.

Third before Lent 2025 by Dn Lucy
Jeremiah 17:5-10
1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Luke 6:17-26

I want to start this morning by asking a question:
What comes to mind when you imagine a life well lived?

What does the ‘Good life’ look like?

Who do you imagine when you picture the person who is blessed?

Here in the City of London we might think of success, security, satisfaction, health - a good pension, a comfortable home, respect from our peers. We know what blessing looks like, don’t we? But today’s readings challenge and complicate many of the assumptions we hold.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus stands on level ground, surrounded by a great crowd drawn from Judea, Jerusalem, and the coastal regions of Tyre and Sidon. They press in, desperate to touch him, as power streams from him. Diseases are healed, troubled spirits finding peace, and broken lives are made whole. This isn’t power being hoarded or controlled. It’s flowing out to anyone who needs it. Luke shows us Jesus both healing and teaching—the power that transforms bodies also transforms understanding.

To these same people who’ve just experienced his healing touch, Jesus speaks directly: “Blessed are you who are poor... who are hungry... who weep.” And each blessing is paired with a warning: “But woe to you who are rich... who are full... who laugh now.” Jesus’ words represent a complete reversal of how the world measures blessing and success.

Why are the poor blessed? Perhaps it’s because when you have nothing else to fall back on, you have to fall back on God. When all other sources of security and comfort fail, you discover the one source that never runs dry. As Jesus says elsewhere in Luke’s Gospel, “Those who are well have no need of a physician but those who are sick.” Worldy blessings, whilst not bad in and of themselves, have the potential to make us blind to our very real need for a Saviour. They can divert our trust and our desires away from God, towards that which is finite and transient.

This theme of trust emerges powerfully in our reading from Jeremiah. Through imagery that resonated deeply with his audience, the prophet contrasts two ways of living: those who trust in mere human strength are like a desert shrub in barren salt lands, isolated and struggling, unable to recognise relief when it comes. Those who trust in God are like trees planted by water, with roots that go deep, staying green and fruitful even in times of drought.

Jeremiah wrote during the final years of Judah, as the kingdom faced existential threats from Babylon. His people placed their faith in military alliances with Egypt, in political strategies, in false religion and the worship of idols - in everything but God. In this time of national crisis, the temptation to trust in human solutions must have been overwhelming.

We face similar choices today. Though our circumstances differ from ancient Judah, our tendency to seek security in temporary things remains the same - in financial stability, professional success, social standing, or carefully constructed plans for the future. Unless our trust is in God, we are like that desert shrub in a parched land. Our hearts can deceive us in subtle ways: claiming faith while lying awake worrying about market fluctuations, speaking of finding our worth in God while seeking validation through social media likes and our own carefully curated image. Like Jeremiah’s audience, we often don’t recognise how we’ve placed our deepest trust in everything but God.

The Corinthians were wrestling with their own version of this struggle. They were getting caught up in philosophical debates about resurrection, treating it like an interesting intellectual puzzle. But Paul insists—this isn’t just speculation. The power that raised Jesus from the dead is the same power that offers us redemption and renewal. They are inseparable. If Christ has not been raised, Paul argues, faith is futile. We remain in our sins. Those who have died in Christ have perished. Yet Christ has been raised—and this transforms everything about where we place our trust.

As I was preparing this sermon, I was reminded of Gavin Bryars’ beautiful composition, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which I’m sure many of you will be familiar with. The piece centres on a recording of a homeless man singing a simple song of faith: “Jesus’ blood never failed me yet, never failed me yet, Jesus’ blood never failed me yet. This one thing I know, for he loves me so.”

By worldly standards, this man had nothing—no money, no security, no home. You can hear all this in his voice. Yet his words carry a profound truth about where real security lies. The power of this composition endures precisely because this homeless man, who had been failed by life in every conventional way, could sing with unwavering conviction about the one thing that never failed him. His faith was not based on external circumstances but on the unshakable certainty that Christ’s sacrifice was enough, that God’s love had never abandoned him, and that in Jesus’ blood, he found his refuge and redemption.

So what does this tell us about what makes a blessed life? Perhaps it looks very different from our initial assumptions. Perhaps it means having nothing left but God - and discovering that God is enough. Perhaps it means reaching the end of our own resources - and discovering there the power that comforts and renews.

And what does this mean for us as a church? What makes a successful church? Is it one where everyone seems to have their lives together, where the pews are overflowing with shiny happy people? Or is it one where sinners like you and me come bringing all our imperfections, wounds, and failings; where we kneel together before the altar, not in self-sufficiency, but in recognition of our deep need for Christ’s healing and resurrection life?

God’s power brings life out of death, hope out of despair, renewal out of brokenness. Jesus does not withhold his grace; his healing flows abundantly to all who call on him. But true reception of this grace requires a heart turned toward God—a willingness to repent, to be changed, to let go of false securities and cling to the only source that endures. Like that homeless man’s song, our faith is not rooted in external circumstances but in the unshakable truth of Christ’s love and redeeming blood. To choose to live without this God, Jeremiah tells us, is as foolish as choosing to live without water in the desert.

So, where do we place our trust today? In what is fleeting, or in the God who raises the dead? In our own fragile resources, or in the boundless grace that restores and renews? May we, like that unnamed homeless man, come to know that Jesus’ blood never fails. May we find blessing not in worldly abundance, but in the life that Christ freely gives. And may we, as a church, be a place where his grace overflows—where those who seek him find healing, where those who turn to him find new life, and where his saving power is made known to all.

Fourth before Lent 2025 by Fr Jack

Isaiah 6. 1-end

1 Corinthians 15. 1-11

St Luke 5. 1-11

We’ve said it before, but today’s first reading from Isaiah reminds us that angelic beings are fierce and scary not like the little statuettes we buy of angels in garden centres. 

Today’s first lesson is an image of God’s glory. The earth quakes the air is thick with winged seraphim.  

And this vision of heavenly glory in the first part of the first reading is in stark contrast to the last few verses, which tell us about the tumult below. 

Isaiah could have been writing today. The world feels like tumult, cities do lie in waste: Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan. Trump in the Whitehouse, the far right in Europe, economic stagnation, adolescent mental health. Insert your own tumult of choice: the list goes on. 

So there is a tension held in this reading, the tumult we face in the world on the one hand, and the vision of God’s glory on the other. We here, now face the reality of the tumult in our human family, we are those who cry ‘how long, O Lord!’, and we come here, in the midst of life to behold God’s glory. To praise God, to hear holy Scripture, to participate in the Holy Mystery of the Eucharist.

We don’t come here to pretend, to shut out that which is difficult. No, every time we come to the Eucharist (midweek and Sunday) we do it for everyone else. Just as Isaiah says ‘Here I am Lord, send me’ in the first reading, we do something similar by coming here, and bringing the tumult and disaster, the whole human family with us into God’s presence, into God’s glory. And we pray for healing, for peace and justice. Thy Kingdom come, O Lord.

It is here, then, that the tension in today’s first reading is held and unified: that the world’s tragic tumult meets the the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven. And eventually, that Kingdom will overcome. 

There’s that spirit alive in Byrd’s magnificent setting of the Ave Verum we hear today during Holy Communion. Hail true body - in Christ’s body on the cross, in Christ’s body in the Eucharist, in Christ’s body that is us the church, the reality of suffering and the glory that is to come live together towards the hope of heaven. 

That same idea is reflected in today’s second lesson. St Paul is trying to encourage and shape the culture in the troubled Early Church in Corinth by reminding them of who they truly are. Back to foundations - remember who we are. He gives them this wonderful summary of the Christian faith, today’s second reading. These are words we need to hear too, as we go about trying to be an Easter people in a troubled world, amidst our own challenges and realities. St Paul reminds us that God has called and equipped us, just as He did His apostles, and St Paul on the road to Damascus. So His grace has been given to us, in our baptism. 

We just need to remember the foundation stone on which we are built, and face the reality of life, with these firm foundations of hope. Again there’s that unity and tension at work (in Isaiah and St Paul): reality and faith, the faith we hold and the reality we live, held together. 

And this brings us finally to today’s Gospel. St Paul calls him Cephas in the second reading, but he’s Simon in the Gospel today. 

Cephas or Petrus (the same word, just Aramaic and Greek) Peter (in English) is a nickname that Jesus has not yet given him when He makes Him a ‘fisher of men’ today. Jesus loves giving nicknames. He does it a lot. Ss James and John He will nickname Boanerges or ‘sons of thunder’ because of their fiery passionate temperament. Simon the fisherman will be called Peter, Petrus, Cephas, literally ‘Rocky’ - it’s a descriptive nickname of affection, not a formal title. We have made ‘St Peter’ sound so grand, but ‘Rocky’ is much more the spirit of what Jesus will nickname. It’s rather surprising and funny isn’t it?

We heard the stunning poem The Call today, before the Gospel. Words by the great Anglican priest-poet George Herbert, music by Vaughan Williams. This simple poem draws on Scripture to voice a soul calling out to God. It is full of hope, but it is also a fragile cry coming from the deepest need of God. I think its intimacy would voice perfectly a walk with you, just you, and Jesus along the seashore of Galilee. Hold on to that image.

So, the first two readings both have this sense of facing the difficulty of reality, whilst returning to the solid ground of our foundations: our faith in God’s coming, glorious Kingdom. A troubled world and a vision of glory for Isaiah. A troubled church in Corinth being reminded of their real calling and identity. But here in the Gospel, the solid ground we return to is different. Because here the solid ground is a God who (instead of the glory of Isaiah) is wandering up and down the seaside giving out nicknames.

Isaiah’s image is true: God is all glory and majesty and might, and we very well should fall on our faces in awe and holy fear. But God is also the one who walks along the seaside, and calling us by name, gives us a nickname out of humorous affection. We face the reality of life strengthened not only by the God of glory, but also, the loving friendship of Jesus.

St Peter brings these two poles together when, after the miraculous catch, he glimpses God in Jesus and falls on his face, saying ‘Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ as if he were before Isaiah’s glorious vision, not in a boat full of flopping fish. Because of course he is. He is before Jesus, our God and our King. And it all comes together, this tension of awe and intimacy, of God’s Kingdom and our confused little world. And we bring and meet it all here, in the Scriptures the Church gives for us today, and in this and every Eucharist.

Friends, we are being invited to live this tension and unity: having first fallen on our faces in holy fear before God, to stand firmly on faith, hope and love, as we face the reality of life without flinching, because we walk life side by side with Jesus who calls us His friends.

Evensong Homily, Candlemas 2025 by Dn Lucy
Haggai 2:1-9
Romans 12:1-5

Have you ever started a DIY project full of enthusiasm, only to realise halfway through that it’s not going as planned? Maybe the shelf doesn’t quite fit, the paint looks completely different from the sample, or the flat-pack furniture has left you with extra screws you’re pretty sure were supposed to go somewhere. That sinking feeling – “This isn’t turning out the way I imagined” – is one we can all relate to. 

Or maybe, like me, there’s a DIY project you’ve been planning for years but never quite got around to starting. For the past two years, the bubble-wrapped pictures stacked against our landing wall have stood in silent reproach, waiting to be re-hung since we repainted the hall and stairwell.

In Haggai Chapter 2, the people of Israel are facing something similar. They’ve returned from exile, and they’ve finally started rebuilding the Temple. But it’s not looking like the glorious building they had imagined. Some of the older generation remember Solomon’s Temple in all its splendour, and this new version looks… well, underwhelming. God even acknowledges their disappointment: “Is it not in your sight as nothing?” The dream doesn’t match the reality. 

But here’s the thing - just a little while earlier, in Haggai 1, these same people were criticised for not starting the work at all. First, they’re too apathetic to build, and now they’re too disheartened to continue. And that feels… familiar.

How often do we have a vision for our lives, our families, our church, and yet reality doesn't quite match up? We put things off because they feel too hard. Or when we finally get going, we lose heart because they don’t turn out as we hoped. Maybe we start a new job, a new project, a new relationship, and think, “This isn’t as exciting as I expected.” Or maybe, like the people in Haggai’s time, we compare things to the past – “It was better before.” 

God speaks into their discouragement. He says: “Take courage… Work, for I am with you.” The real glory of the Temple won’t be in how impressive it looks, but in God’s presence among them.

Fast forward to John Chapter 2, and Jesus says something shocking: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The religious leaders are confused. The Temple they see has taken forty-six years to build—how could Jesus rebuild it in three days? But Jesus is talking about something even greater. He’s saying: “I am the true Temple.” God’s presence isn’t found in a building, but in a person.

Today is Candlemas, when we remember how Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the Temple. There, they encounter Simeon and Anna - two elderly servants who had spent decades waiting and watching for God’s promised salvation. These two faithful watchers see what everyone else misses. After all those years of waiting, Simeon takes the child in his arms and declares, ‘A light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel.’ And just now, we have heard those very words sung in the Nunc Dimittis.

Think about that moment. In this magnificent Temple, two elderly people recognise that the true meeting place between God and humanity is not in stone and gold - it’s in this tiny baby. The one they’ve been waiting for all these years isn’t a grand building, but a person - Jesus Christ himself.

So, what does this mean for us? Well, like those in Haggai’s day, we often feel discouraged when things don’t go as expected. Maybe our faith feels weak, our efforts seem small, or life just isn’t matching up to what we hoped for.

But here’s the extraordinary good news: We don’t have to build our way to God’s presence. We don’t have to make ourselves worthy. Christ has already done the work. He is the true Temple - not just showing us God’s presence, but securing it for us forever through his death and resurrection.

When Simeon held that baby in the Temple, he saw what we so often miss - that God’s greatest work often looks small and ordinary at first. The true glory wasn’t in the magnificent building around him, but in the child in his arms.

So if life feels like a DIY project gone wrong - if your spiritual life feels as unfinished as those pictures still wrapped up on my landing - take heart. The gospel tells us that God is working, even when we can’t see it. Christ’s presence with us doesn’t depend on our ability to build something impressive. He is enough. And through him, God is building something far greater than we can imagine.

Amen.

Candlemas 2025 by Fr Jack

The Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple

Malachi 3.1-5

Hebrews 2.14-18

St Luke 2. 22-40

The name is obvious, once you’re told. The Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple, or (in the old dispensation) the Purification of the BVM (The Blessed Virgin Mary) commonly called Candlemas. 

40 day old baby Jesus is brought like every first born Jewish boy to the Temple to be offered to the Lord, and the mother to be ritually restored to religious fellowship after child birth. All very standard for Jesus’ context. But this strange old man grabs the baby from Blessed Mary and proclaims Him to be the ‘light to lighten the gentiles, and the glory of God’s ancient people, the Jews’ - this is a light for everyone.

So, by tradition, all the candles that are to be used in the coming year are piled up in church and blessed. This feast of lights, candles and Christ, just as we rejoice in the days beginning to lengthen, and the nights shorten towards Spring. 

It all makes sense - all these connections of Temple worship at the time, our theological associations with the text, church life and practise, and the turning of the seasons. Alongside, of course, Simeon providing the text of the Nunc Dimittis, that great prayer of readiness for the end of the day, and the end of life, in Night Prayer and in Choral Evensong: ‘Lord lettest now thy servant depart in peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation…’. Those words and their musical settings that are such gifts for life in this so often bewildered and weary world. 

Except for the the fact that nowadays, we just order candles on next day delivery from a warehouse in Kent somewhere, and I don’t know anyone who is sufficiently organised to order a year’s worth at at time in order to bless them today!

But here we have some this morning, that will burn in the year ahead, and we shall bless them! And in so doing bless all those who will light them in prayer, or pray by their light, or spend time in here midweek when all there is is the flickering lights by the Reserved Sacrament or St Giles up there.

Anyway, the question I want to ask is this: what does it mean to say that Jesus is the light to lighten the world? Well, I want to pick just one idea to run with briefly. In church we might stare mindlessly at candles, hypnotised by their flickering loveliness, especially during long boring sermons like this one. But more usually we don’t look at light, we see by light. So, if Christ is the light of the world, the light to enlighten all. What might it mean for us to see the world by Christ?

That is very much an open question. If you now disappear with your own thoughts on that, please do. But here, briefly, are a few things that occurred to me - I hope they’re helpful. Please ignore them if they’re not.

I remember Year 8 science. Light bounces off an object into my eye - We had to draw a big eye, a table or a chair or something and the sun and a nice sharp set of arrows - ping, pang, pong. So off we go: if we are to see by the light of Christ, the light for everyone, then Christ is that which connects and interprets our experience of the world. If you follow me back to Year 8 in lab 17, then Christ is the sun, and the arrows that join my strangely huge eye in the corner of the page, and the world around. 

So, here the rubber starts to meet the road: 

To see the world by Christ is to have a very different slant on what is deemed important or impressive. People, attributes, achievements, possessions, labels, whatever.

To see the world by Christ is to think quite differently about what will endure, and what is temporary. 

To see the world by the light of Christ is to have a completely transformed understanding of value - how we spend our time, our money our energy.

Suddenly time spent in worship and prayer, waiting on God, is not a luxury or a maybe, but the most real thing we ever do, time treasured and spent well. 

And to see the world by Jesus the light of the world is (amongst other things) to increasingly find that we are living - actually living - not just thinking, or proposing, by living the most bizarre, maddening and wonderful set of contradictions. You’ll perhaps have heard me and other preachers talk before about how Jesus turns the social and religious order upside down. And that His Kingdom is a topsy-turvey one in which poverty is wealth and vice versa, in which death is the doorway to everlasting life (just as the second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us today), in which status is ignominy, and the outsider most beloved. And all that is true. So when we live by the light of Christ - experience and interpret and relate to the world in and by Christ - we find all these things becoming true in us and for us. 

Every prayer we say, every liturgy we participate in, every time we receive Holy Communion, every time we open the Bible and swim in its waters, every act of faith, hope or love - all is to be seeing and be able to see more and more, by this light. 

How might this translate into your life at present?

Take a moment, in the silence after you’ve received Holy Communion or a blessing, or during the organ postlude right at the end of the service, and ask yourself.

But before you do (and in case I haven’t been clear) it's helpful to have friends to show us the way, and we don’t have to look any further than today’s Gospel.

Simeon and Anna have waited for years. Years spent waiting, unknowing, for this moment, when because they have waited faithfully, they will be in the right place at the right time. A lifetime spent waiting, for a moment that would make it all worthwhile. 

It flies in the face of everything we’re taught about ambition, success, good sense. They are the tatty, mad old folk who hang around the Temple. But it’s only because they kept faith, and ‘wasted’ all that time, that they saw God face to face. This surely is to see by the light of Christ.

Then there’s Mary who, we’re told by her friend St Luke, ‘stores up’ these things 'in her heart’. The same heart that ‘will be pierced’, we’re told today. She will watch her beloved baby boy, all grown up, die a horrible death. But by storing up her wisdom and love she won’t run away, she will stay and watch, and thereby, be ready to greet Him when He walks out the tomb a few days later.

Mary shows us what tenacity and love look like. What’s the old adage? To love is the suffer, but not to love is to not be alive at all. Mary lives by the light of Christ, and thereby fulfils the plan God has for her life.

There are just a couple of snapshots from today’s Gospel about living life by the light of Jesus. Please do chew over your own, as you find and step into God’s plan for your life (in the big stuff, and moment by moment). Because there can be no greater adventure than to ask these questions and, by the light of Christ, live for the answers.

Epiphany 3 2025 by Fr Jack

Nehemiah 8. 1-3, 5,6, 8-10

1 Corinthians 12. 12-31a

St Luke 4. 14-21

Todays’s first lesson comes from the Book of Nehemiah. To some extent it continues the theological themes of last Sunday’s Gospel - the feasting Jesus facilitates at the wedding at Cana. Here too (five centuries before Christ) God is commanding His people to feast, to rejoice. To feast is not sinful, overindulgent, or frivolous, it is part of our calling as God’s people. It is us responding truthfully to the wonderful gift that God has given us, that is to say: life. 

We feast, mindful of those who have not, yes, praying for those who cannot, yes, but we do feast. 

After all, as Christians we are a people defined by Eucharist. ‘Eucharist’ means ‘thanksgiving’. Every Eucharist (even quiet midweek celebrations with just one or two people in the Lady Chapel) is a divine feast. At every Eucharist we foretaste heaven’s banquet. 

In this way feasting is who we are. Jesus shows us this (at Cana last Sunday) and in how much time of His earthly ministry He spends dining with those He meets. And today we go way back to Nehemiah as he commands God’s people to feast, those who have prepared, and those who have not - all are welcome. Just as Jesus, five centuries later, will tell parables resonating with the same invitation: come, the wafes and strays, come to the King’s feast. 

Where are you in this picture? Feasting? Outside? With Jesus? Waiting for Him to call?

Today in the Gospel Jesus speaks the words of the Prophet Isaiah eight centuries before, setting out God’s priorities (the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed) . God speaks of restoration and liberation, and in this theological context of feasting, we might say, all are invited to the feast of the Kingdom, and nothing (including poverty or infirmity or imprisonment - irreparable barriers in the time of Jesus) will be allowed to get in the way. 

But we’ve already got ahead of ourselves. Let’s track back and join up some of these dots.

Nehemiah, today’s first lesson, is five centuries before Christ. It is the time of the Exile. The Jews have been rounded up and taken to Babylon as slaves of the emperor. Their historic lands, their temple, their communities all gone. ‘By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept’. 

    But during this period of exile, Nehemiah arises as an Israelite in the service of the Babylonian emperor Artaxerxes; his cup bearer in fact, a close personal servant. And Nehemiah gets himself put in charge of Jerusalem - he becomes Governor of Judah. He sets about rebuilding the walls of the Holy City, and restores the life of God’s people, and the Temple. Go home and read Nehemiah in the Old Testament. It is a wonderful text full of colour and life. 

Today’s snippet is a great moment of restoration and revelation: the priest Ezra stands in the Water Gate, on the eastern wall of Jerusalem, just down from the Mount of Olives, and reads this great joyful commandment to feast. I suspect the lectionary sets it for today in this season of Epiphany (of revealing) because it is a moment of revelation: the people who have been in exile and shrouded in darkness are back in Jerusalem, hearing the words of the Torah, and worshipping the Living God, and we’re told they understand the significance of all this. They get it. All the confusion and estrangement of exile is over, and now everything is aligned, fallen into place: Law and Temple, God and people. A moment of Epiphany, fulfilment and home coming. 

But we know it’s not that simple. It’s not yet ‘happily ever after’. We know that the Old Testament is a long catalogue of disaster: of people drifting from God, disaster ensuing, people panic and return to God, it all goes ok, then people drift from God again, and repeat… From Adam until now, that is the human story: our goldfish memory, God’s faithfulness. 

And in this way the Old Testament is a pretty good mirror for our reality now. Looking at our world today, the political and social crises all around us.

Jerusalem feasting under Nehemiah is not the end of the story. There is plenty more woe to come, but not just despite that, but almost because of that, they, we feast. We feast in the face of disaster, death and inhumanity, because we know that by our feasting here in the Kingdom of the Risen Lord, we live towards an end to these disasters, dragging the world towards the feast that will never end.

Today, the priest Ezra proclaims (and all of us can hear and understand!) “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and [generously] send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus stands in the Synagogue and His proclamation of the Kingdom, and list of priorities resounds with the same lavish invitation. 

Let’s draw this together, and then I have one last point to make.

In Nehemiah, and the story of ancient Israel, and in Jesus and the Kingdom He brings, we see the same hallmarks of God at work, and those same realties echo in us as we hear these Scriptures and share the Eucharist. We find an honesty about human history and the human condition. But despite, and indeed because of that frailty, we have even greater reason to feast: because of the inestimable gift of the resurrection life, of the coming Kingdom, into which we feast, into which we live more and more and more. To feast with Christ in the Eucharist is to be transformed by grace, and thereby to change the world, even just one heart at a time.

And this is were I neatly (sort of) segway into my final point…

This weekend is the conclusion of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We know that the Church today and historically has been beset by the sin of division. We used to burn each other alive, now we just argue and blow hot air. This is, of course, self defeating. Because we are called to feast, as today’s Scriptures say: to worship and feast together, so says Ezra and Nehemiah, Christ and Isaiah, and St Paul. In today’s second lesson he spells out so clearly the gift of difference in the church. Diversity in unity in his wonderful body analogy - the hand, eye and ear being a gift one to another. Each incomplete without the other. 

Seen this way, no part of the Church is ‘complete’ or ‘correct’, because we are made whole only by our difference and togetherness. In a moment we will confess faith in the Catholic Church in the words of the Creed. Not the Roman Catholic Church, but the Universal Church. The kata holos in Greek (Catholic) which literally means according to the whole. So unless we belong to the wholeness, the whole is not whole without us. This is not a language or theology of conformity, but of wholeness. Just as the Three Persons of the Trinity are one in their unity of diversity, their particularity and their personhood, one in love and being. As people here in St Giles’, as a diocese, as the C of E and Anglican Communion, and as the universal Holy Catholic Church worldwide, we are not ourselves, unless we are all here, together, ‘according to the whole’. Not uniform, but united. Not divergent, but diverse: hands, and eyes and feet. So we give thanks today for the gifts our brothers and sisters who are not like us, give to us, by being with us at Jesus’ feast. 

Forgive me if I’ve tried to cover too much ground today. It is rich meat. But perhaps to sum it all up in one line: friends, we have been invited to a party, by which we, the church and the whole world are invited to taste heaven together and be transformed.

Epiphany 2 2025 by Fr Jack

Isaiah 62. 1-5

1 Corinthians 12. 1-11

St John 2. 1-11

A few people this December were a little nervous about the prophet Isaiah talking of God’s promise to ‘Israel’ (in the readings at Carol Services and those kind of things) because of the contemporary political situation there. Today we hear again of promises to ‘Zion’ to ‘Jerusalem’ in the prophet, speaking eight centuries before Christ. But, in the last 20 centuries, if we had censored or renamed those parts of God’s world every time they had been subject to fresh controversy or trouble, we wouldn’t have said much at all. Quite apart from the fact that the words ‘Israel’ and ‘Zion’ have been labels used for very different realities across the sweep of human history. It really is apples and pears. 

Nonetheless, perhaps it is precisely because the land of Christ’s birth is so tragically and so often subject to human smallness and violence, that it needs to be held up in prayer, that it needs to be respoken (even with heartbreak) in our Scriptures and liturgies. Who knows, perhaps it says something that it is in exactly that place of humanity’s terrible flawedness that God comes as the Christ Child the magi worship? 

And we are still with the magi, still in Christmastide, until Candlemas on the 2nd of February, when the forty day old infant Jesus will be presented in the Temple. So January is a whole season of Epiphany, of revelation and realising just who this Christ Child is. 

And today, is a most wonderful showing. We Christians have always held that Epiphany holds three wonders in one sight: today, the magi adore the infant, today we hear the voice of the Father at the baptism of the Lord by St John Baptist, today water is turned into wine at the wedding feast. Always these three revelations are layered up, in the lectionary readings in these weeks, in altarpieces and great paintings, in the preface to the Eucharist Prayer I will shortly pray on your behalf: they are woven together like three strands making a cord. Three Epiphanies, One Epiphany. Three events, one revelation. 

And today is a glorious one. Up in the hill country, quite apart from the sad subjection of Zion and Jerusalem, we are invited to a wedding…

Let’s open our eyes and see what is being revealed in this Epiphany. 

This is the first of Jesus’ miracles. That is important. This miracle of abundance, and generosity and fun and feasting, is how God chooses to set out His stall. This is an important theological principle, and mustn’t be forgotten. 

And it’s the ‘third day’. St John wants us to hear those echoes of ‘on the third day’ - Easter Day, of course. This wedding feast is a moment of God’s new creation. This is a moment of the Kingdom of Heaven being revealed, just as the Resurrection will be. And everything here in this new creation being revealed, in God’s Kingdom, is about generosity: the jars are to be ‘filled’ not ‘get me some water’ but ‘fill’ the jars. 

To the ‘brim’, we are told. 

We’re supposed to notice this is an image of heaven too: a wedding feast, just as St John will tell us heaven is in his book of Revelation: the wedding banquet of the Lamb. Revelation will tell us about the Apostles on their twelve thrones, and Mary, Queen of Heaven, crowned with stars. And here at this revealing of the Kingdom of Heaven, at this wedding feast at Cana, St John deliberately takes time to tell us that the Apsotles are there, with Mary, the mother of the Lord. St John is curating these resonances quite deliberately for us. He wants us to see! 

So heaven is foreshadowed in this generous, abundant feast, with Jesus and Mary and the Apostles. But there’s abundance here in other ways too:

‘Do whatever he tells you’, says Mary. Not, ‘do x or y’, not ‘do just enough’ but an abundance of attention and obedience is required of us (who are of course the servants in this passage, being instructed, and let into the secret).

And Jesus is concerned with full obedience too. He hesitates because His hour has not yet come. All the way through His ministry, Jesus is very careful to ensure that the prophecies of the Old Testament are respected and brought to bear in the right way, at the right time. This appears to be an acceleration of His ministry by a pushy mother. (My Jewish friends usually say ‘classic Jewish mother’ at this point! But that’s not for me to say!) 

But even here, generosity is the hallmark: Jesus gives His mother a respectful form of address ‘woman’ (it sounds like an insult in modern English, but it is precisely the opposite in this cultural context), and then, best of all, Jesus responds by turning water into perhaps 700/800 bottles of wine. For a country village wedding, after all the prepared wine has already been drunk. That is quite a thing. 

Jesus’ first miracle speaks for itself. It is the perfect day for those who have signed up for the parish lunch today! It is a rallying cry for us all in our faith, in our prayer lives, in our worship, in our finances and politics, in our families, at work and home, with neighbours, and with our internal conversation: with our own selves, to make generosity, feasting, respect and abundance, the way we respond to God’s abundance gift. 

And this is not glib or twee. It is brave and real. All of life, all of it is God’s gift to us, if only we have the wisdom to receive it as such.

To see this point in today’s Gospel, we need to spot another of St John’s resonances. St John says, towards the end of today’s Gospel passage, that Jesus ‘revealed His glory’ through this miracle. Whenever St John’s Gospel speaks of glory, he is speaking about the cross, the moment St John will come to call ‘Jesus’ glory’. We’ll hear that again and again from St John as we come into Lent and Holy Week. Understood this way, even the wine of Cana is an image of blood, of crucifixion, and an image of the Eucharistic sacrifice. For St John, today’s generosity is intimately intertwined with sacrifice, with the cross, and with the Eucharist. His Body broken, His Blood poured out. It’s not simple or shallow, but it is still abundance, and life and joy. It’s just complicated. Just as isaiah’s promises (with which we began today) are real and true, they are just messily lived out in the winding roads and mess of human history. And that is perhaps precisely what makes this theological imperative of generosity, this call to abundance in the Gospel today so vital, and so real. Not because it is simple or easy but because God wills it, and God does it, and so must we. Because if it is God’s way, then any other way will take us nowhere in the end. 

In our faith, in our prayer lives, in our worship, in our finances and politics, in our families, at work and home, with neighbours, and with our own selves, to make generosity, feasting, respect and abundance, the way we respond to God’s gift of life.

The Baptism of Christ, by Dn Lucy

12th January 2025

Isaiah 43. 1–7

Acts 8. 14–17

Luke 3. 15–17, 21–22

There’s a very particular mix of excitement and anxiety that accompanies the privilege of choosing a name for a child. When I was pregnant with each of our children, my husband and I spent hours trying out different names, testing how they felt on our lips, wondering if they captured something of the essence of this new life growing within. The origins and meanings mattered deeply – we pored over baby name books, reflecting on the history and associations each name carried. We considered nicknames, initials, how each one might sound across a playground or at a graduation ceremony. We wanted names we loved the sound of, that would suit both a toddler and a High Court judge, names that were distinctively theirs but also marked them as belonging to our family. When our youngest daughter was born, we used every one of the legal days allowed before registering her birth, wanting to be absolutely sure we’d chosen well.

In all this care and attention over naming, we glimpse something profound about being named by God. Through the prophet Isaiah, God speaks to a people who had lost everything, who wondered if they still mattered, if they had been forgotten. To them – to us – God declares: “I have called you by name; you are mine”. This isn’t mere labelling; it’s knowing, claiming, loving. And if we, as human parents, put such thought into naming our children, how much more significant is it when the Creator of all names us?

The language God uses through Isaiah is deeply personal and tender: “You are precious in my sight and honoured and I love you”. But it’s also universal in scope – God promises to gather children from every direction, from the ends of the earth. This combination of intimate love and universal embrace points us forward to Jesus’ baptism and the early church.

Let’s turn to what happens at the Jordan. The people are filled with expectation, wondering if John might be the Messiah. Throughout Advent, we heard John insist “I am not the light” – his role was to testify to the light. Now we see that testimony reach its climax. “I baptise with water”, he says, “but one more powerful than I is coming. This one will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire”.

The location itself is significant – this is where Israel first entered the promised land, where Elijah was taken up to heaven, where God’s promises were repeatedly fulfilled. When John appears at the Jordan, baptising with water and promising one who will baptise with fire, he’s deliberately evoking these memories of God’s transforming presence.

Then Jesus steps into those waters. The heavens open – echoing Isaiah’s plea “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down”. The Spirit descends like a dove, recalling both the Spirit hovering over creation’s waters and the dove that returned to Noah with an olive leaf, signifying that God’s promise of renewal was at hand. And a voice from heaven declares: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”. In this moment, we witness one of the clearest revelations of the Trinity in scripture – Father, Son and Holy Spirit all present and active.

John’s words about winnowing and fire point to something profound about baptism. Like a farmer separating wheat from chaff, this isn’t just about cleaning us up – it’s about revealing and transforming who we truly are. The same wind that blows away the chaff reveals the precious grain beneath; the same fire that consumes what’s worthless refines what’s valuable.

When Isaiah speaks of passing through waters and fire, he addresses a people who knew real danger and devastation. Today, as we witness wildfires and floods around the globe, we must handle these metaphors with care and grief. Yet perhaps it’s precisely in such times that Isaiah’s words take on their deepest meaning. "When you pass through the waters... when you walk through fire" – notice Isaiah doesn’t say ‘if’ but ‘when’. God’s promise isn’t to prevent all suffering, but to be with us through it.

What might seem like threatening elements – water that could overwhelm, fire that could consume – become, in God’s hands, the very means of revealing and refining who we truly are. This is what baptism does – it both reveals our true identity as God’s beloved children and transforms us into who we’re meant to be. This moment at the Jordan transforms our understanding of Isaiah’s prophecy. When God says “I have called you by name; you are mine” and promises “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you”, we now see this wasn’t just about Israel’s protection. It was pointing forward to this moment when the beloved Son would step into the waters, making it possible for all of us to be named as God’s children.

That’s exactly what we see happening in Acts. When the Samaritans – historically estranged from the Jews – are baptised in the name of Jesus and receive the Holy Spirit, the vision of a united people under God begins to be fulfilled. Baptism in Jesus’s name becomes the means by which people from every nation are brought into God’s family, transcending historical divisions. Notice that both water and the Spirit are essential in this process, reflecting the pattern set by Jesus’ own baptism. The early Church understood baptism not merely as a ritual washing away of sins, but as a profound participation in Christ’s death and resurrection and as the reception of the Spirit promised through him.

This two–fold pattern of water and Spirit shows us something crucial about Christian identity. Baptism incorporates us into a new way of being human – one that is fundamentally about relationship and communion rather than our culture’s focus on individual distinction. Think about how different this is from our modern understanding of identity, where names often serve to mark our uniqueness or personal brand. In baptism, we’re given a name that marks us as belonging to a family, as participating in Christ’s own relationship with God through the Spirit.

As we remember Christ’s baptism today, may we also remember our own–not as a distant ritual but as the ongoing reality of who we are: named, claimed and beloved by God. Like a parent choosing a name with care, God has named us in baptism, drawing us into Christ’s intimacy with the Father through the Spirit. This new name – Christian – isn’t just a label; it reshapes our very existence, calling us to live as a family rooted in communion and love.

Each time we hear those words from the Jordan –“You are my Son, the Beloved”– may we recognise our own story in Christ’s. May we know, deep in our bones, that we too are called “Beloved” and sent into the world to bear witness to that love.

So let us live in the confidence that we are God’s cherished children. And let our lives proclaim the truth of our baptism: that we belong to One who names us, loves us, and promises to be with us always.

Epiphany 2025 by Fr Jack

Isaiah 60.1-6

Ephesians 3.1-12

St Matthew 2.1-12

I’m going to start by reading a poem. If you’ve never heard it before, dive in; if it’s an old favourite, try to hear something new.

It is called: The Journey Of The Magi by T.S. Eliot

And the opening line is from a sermon by a vicar of this parish, the saintly Bishop Lancelot Andrewes. Taken from a sermon preached before the King’s majesty on today’s subject matter. I am reliably informed, that as was normal in those days, Andrewes had probably preached these sermons here and in other other places before using them at court. So, he may well have said these words himself in this place. Anyway, The Journey Of The Magi by T.S. Eliot

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Eliot holds life and death in a rather dizzying tension in this poem. Like us as we begin 2025, Jesus had it all before Him. We of course know the story ahead for Jesus. Eliot, a devout Anglican, writes characteristically rich with images and half-revealed symbols. The three trees on the low sky - a reference to Calvary and the three crosses, looming even then? The Magi brought myrrh for burial after all. The water mill and the vine - water and blood: Baptism and Eucharist, the vine leaves. The Pale Horse from Revelation, death. But Eliot doesn’t permit us just to know the story he disturbs us to be caught by these events and what will come out of them. Caught. Entangled. Like fish on a hook or thread carried through a weave.

All this could sound very negative, and there is real unease in the air as Eliot finishes. There’s unease in parts of the Gospel account too.

But being disturbed and entangled by this story is not actually a negative thing. It is in fact the invitation to Christian life. So much in our part of the world, in our time, tells us that our humanity is at its best when we are self-reliant, complete and insulated from needs, or doubts or anything that smacks of incompleteness.

The vision sketched out for us by the Good News of Jesus is completely the opposite of this. Christ doesn’t come among us as a handsome, rich, clever, able leader: He’s a baby. Babies need more love than they can give; they need protection and feeding and changing and cherishing. 

Today’s Feast of Epiphany is properly called ‘The Manifestation of Our Lord Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, commonly known as Epiphany’. The Jewish shepherds, and Jewish Mary and Joseph - they’ve seen and realised. The angels have had their turn too. Now it is the turn of the gentiles, it is time for the news of Christ’s coming and what that means to transcend the community of God’s Chosen People, and be for the whole world, just as St Paul writes to the Ephesian Church in the second lesson today. That’s why the Orthodox Eastern Christians celebrate Christmas today not on 25th December, because this is when we (although not all of us here are gentiles) turned up, it makes sense. God reveals God’s self, is made manifest. And, just as T S Eliot says, it is as challenging and confusing as it is wonderful and lovely. And it will remain so: just read the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. Just read Jesus’ interview with Pontius Pilate or Nicodemus. 

As CS Lewis wrote towards the end of Narnia’s Last Battle: "'Yes,' said Queen Lucy. 'In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.'" This mystery is not simply sweet (like sherbet) it is dizzying, entangling and disturbing.

We have for a few short years lived in the relative peace and prosperity of the settlement won out of the two World Wars. We thought for a while that this would be how life would be, how life was always meant to be and largely was, apart from the temporary and occasional intrusion of war or disaster, or revolution, or environmental or social calamity. Perhaps we are in the process of relearning now, painfully, and sadly, that that post war settlement was in fact the visitor, not the default. We live on this beautiful earth together, but we cannot seem to do it without destroying it and each other. God has given us this world, this life, and we mar and damage. And very often our attempts to protect ourselves and each other just perpetuate the cycle of conflict, imbalance, and ultimately destruction. Life is precarious, fragile and fraught. That is the truth of this life.  

This was the world Jesus came in to, what the world was like when the Magi set out to worship Him, and found Him. This is the world in which we worship Him now. This one who comes not as an emperor, but child, not as one who seizes power, as we always try to do, however well intentioned, but who entangles Himself and us in mystery and love. He will conquer, but not us; He will conquer sin and death for us. He will reign, but not as we do, with the Father, (Isaiah’s joyful prophecy, today’s first reading, will be so) and in the meantime, shares His life with us as we struggle and usually fail to share life with Him and each other in this beautiful life we have been given.

I should be glad of another death, ends Eliot’s Magi. They have brought myrrh after all. There will be another death. In Holy Communion, we witness afresh, and take into ourselves the death of Jesus, His life, His death, and His Resurrection. Just as St Paul writes: ‘Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes’. 

This moment is life and death, manifest for the whole world to see. In it we see reflected the tragic frailty of our life - as people and as a whole human family. And in it we see God’s answer to those truths, and just like Eliot’s Magi, nothing can ever be the same again.