I don’t know what it’s like in the Philippines but back in Britain when it comes to election time you just have the one choice to make—who do I want to represent me in the parliament? And I find that hard enough! How do you get on here? Where everybody seems to be elected … …
Author Archives: Rob
Sunday Week 29 Year C
It’s been the placards that have haunted me these last few days—even more than the awful image of a young man beaten, his skull smashed in, tied to a fence post, mistaken for a scarecrow—the placards at the funeral of Matthew Shepard. Placards carried by a bunch of demonstrators from a local church. “God hates …
Sunday Week 28 Year C
Sometimes we have to go a long way from home to meet the God who has been with us since the beginning. I remember, six years ago, dreading the thought of leaving England to come here to America. I remember looking to the west and seeing only darkness, thinking, “There’s no one there I know, …
Sunday Week 27 Year C
The word I hear echoing around and around these readings today is “faith“. And the way that faith is talked, it sounds like a fragile thing, a thing in short-supply, or at least something you have to work hard to keep. Faith is like the ashes of a fire that have to be stirred into …
Feast of the Archangels
I’ve been doing some research for this homily. I’ve been visiting bookstores—Borders, Barnes and Noble, Cody’s—looking for angel books. The things you do for ministry! Well, I can report that interest in angels is at least six feet long! And, you know, all but an inch or two is extraordinarily self-centred. If you believed what’s …
Wednesday Week 25 Year II
With the homespun wisdom of all proverbs our first reading gets it about right: give us neither poverty nor riches. Feed us too well and we’ll forget the God at whose table we are fed. Starve us and we’ll turn to crime. Set us, O God, on the proverbial middle way and we’ll do the …
Sunday Week 24 Year C
Are you sitting comfortably? … Then I’ll begin. Once upon a time in a land far, far away there was a large and prosperous country proud of its favour in the sight of God. And that country had a monarch, large and prosperous, proud of her favour in the sight of God—so proud in fact …
Sunday Week 22 Year C
“Get off my plane!” growls Harrison Ford, the President of this Great Nation, as he finally throws the last highjacker off Air Force One to plummet to his death. “Get off my plane!” and the audience roars with well-deserved, tension-releasing, self-congratulating, patriotic laughter. “Yes!” Right has triumphed. Goodness has prevailed. And our president is a …
Sunday Week 17 Year C
Since prayer is, perhaps above all, about honesty I need to be honest with you this morning. I find myself right now at a low ebb in the tide of my life. It’s all focused on my dissertation writing which seems to be going nowhere. I can’t bring myself to do what I need to …
Sunday Week 16 Year C
Last week at our Lectors’ meeting this gospel passage stirred up a storm of indignation. Nearly everyone wanted to rush to Martha’s defense. Wanted to defend her against Jesus. Didn’t he now how elder sisters, eldest children in general, are put upon, have always had to be responsible, been forced to take care of things …