I’m suffering from deja vu all over again. The last time I preached on All Saints Day was a Sunday exactly four years ago but half a world away in Oakland, California. Then, like now, it was just a couple of days before a presidential election. A couple of wars later, the decisions placed before …
Yearly Archives: 2004
Friday Week 29 Year II
Interpreting the signs is always a difficult thing. How do we interpret the differences between us, between ourselves here or, on a larger stage, between nations, races, religions? Because different we are, often strangely so, sometimes monstrously. Paul, in the face of difference, is pleading for unity—for charity, selflessness, gentleness and patience. Differences, in his …
Saturday Week 28 Year II
‘May God enlighten the eyes of your mind so that you can see how infinitely great is the power that he has exercised for us.’ There are angels in both readings today. They are being used in each to underline a point, to make clear the gravity of a situation, to guarantee a truth: in …
Wednesday Week 28 Year II
‘Clean’ and ‘unclean’ don’t really mean that much to us nowadays. But for Jesus and his contemporaries they gave life shape and structure. We still have some sense of it in the ickiness of dirt above and beyond hygiene and appearance but the Hebrew idea went beyond that. It’s like the world was full of …
Thursday Week 27 Year II
Paul is at his most pungent today: ‘are you stark raving mad’, he asks the Galatians. Why would you settle for the Law when you have the Spirit? What did the rulebook ever do for you but weigh like a burden on your back? That question echoes through the centuries. It found a focus at …
Sunday Week 25 Year C
We dig the ditch, we build the walls, we try our hardest to keep them at bay as best we can—poverty, disease, terror, discomfort. We do not want these hideous things in our lives. No one wants to be sick. No one wants to be poor. No one wants to be afraid. We dig the …
Monday Week 25 Year II
One thing the book of proverbs has going for it is clarity. Collections of pithy sayings that always sound like reminders of things you have always known. You heard them at your mother’s knee: be good; be kind to others; don’t be resentful; be careful of the company you keep. Schoolteachers spent their breath repeating …
Sunday Week 24 Year C
In my bible it gives a title to these two gospel stories: the lost sheep and the lost coin. I think they should be called the “The Crazy Woman” and “The Bad Shepherd”. What kind of shepherd leaves the 99 at risk to go seek the one? 1% is an acceptable loss; 99% is a …
Saturday Week 22 Year II
‘Who do you say that I am?’ Today’s scripture gives challenging hints. Look at Jesus. Jesus is someone who doesn’t fit into our religious categories. He didn’t then and I don’t think he does now. Every attempt to tame him harms him. Or harms us. ‘If you see the Buddha on the road kill him’, …
Sunday Week 22 Year C
I don’t know what it’s like in your church but one of my bugbears as a catholic priest is the way people sit at the back. On a bad Sunday evening everyone is the length of a football pitch away and you feel like you are performing for empty pews and distant empty faces. I …