Sermons 2025

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.