Seems like dreams can go two ways. Ever had one of those nightmares where you are being chased down long corridors through tangled forests towards the ever receding safety of a half-open door? That door can go two ways: slam shut behind you with a flood or relief or slam shut in your face with …
Category Archives: Homilies
Friday Week 31 Year I (St Charles Borromeo)
They are all at it today. It’s an orgy of self-justification. The parable’s full of it. Paul’s full of it. And even our feast of Charles Borromeo hints of it. How do we do things right? How do we run our diocese, or live out our calling, or just make an easy living? If no …
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Monday Week 29 Year I
You can’t take it with you, they say. And they’re right. We come into this world naked, defenceless and dependent. And that’s the way we leave it. Our barns can be bursting but we can’t carry a single loaf across death’s threshold to save our hungry souls. I like the way God says ‘Fool!’ today. …
Saturday Week 27 Year I
‘Put the sickle in, the harvest is ripe’, says Joel. It’s a common prophetic theme: the end-time, the restoration and reprieve of the chosen people. And all the imagery yokes harvest and judgment: the sickle, the threshing floor, the winnowing fan. It’s even there in the gospels. My New Testament teacher liked to point out …
Thursday Week 27 Year I
There’s something almost comforting about dear old Malachi. It could be a Conservative Party conference in Blackpool. ‘Look at the state of the world. Look at what we’ve come to. Look how things have gone to the dogs.’ It seems things haven’t been the way they used to be for at least a few thousand …
Friday Week 26 Year I
Global warming, acid rain, fuel shortage, hurricane and flood and fire. One of the gifts an ecological awareness has given us is a renewed sense of sin. It used to be hard to read a prophet like Baruch without taking it personally and either going into a decline over your own shameful life or going …
Thursday Week 25 Year I
The little vignette from the gospel tells a tale of power and distance. It seems you can’t have one without the other. Herod might have the power to behead inconvenient prophets and the spies to bring him all the rumours buzzing around Jesus like flies but it’s a power that only buys him distance. All …
Friday Week 24 Year I
Following Jesus sounds almost straightforward in Luke’s gospel today. He makes his way around the place, doing his stuff, speaking Good News. And we follow. Physically follow after him. In his steps. Not too much to it. The author of the letter to Timothy paints an altogether messier portrait of what it means to follow …
Sunday Week 24 Year A
‘He who exacts vengeance will experience the vengeance of the lord’. That’s what the folk wisdom of Ecclesiasticus says. So why can’t I preach a homily underlining that? Let the parable be Jesus threatening us into forgiveness—making an unforgiving heart an unforgivable sin. Partly it’s because I don’t want a schizophrenic God who can be …
Sunday Week 23 Year A
New Orleans has haunted me this week. Watching what happens when the wind and the waves take our presumption of civilization and slap us in the face with it. Some commentators have agonized over such an act of God. A few bigots have taken that phrase literally and gloated of God punishing New Orleans. I …