Sermons 2025

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.

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.