17 Sep 2005
Back Again
It's been a long time. A good deal has changed. I got married in February. And now I have a job. Soon, God willing, we'll have a baby and a mortgage. The big four of Normal Life. And jolly pleasant it is too. All the ancient wisdoms were young once. I was taken out to lunch (in ...
Show whole article (820 words)
21 Jun 2005
Wimbledon Tickets / Stalinism
Fred Perry won Wimbledon in 1936. It was a good year for Soviet economic policy too: half way through the Second Five Year Plan, output three times what it was before the Revolution. The All England Club does its best to keep this Golden Age alive. True, we have not seen another British men's ...
Show whole article (400 words)
18 May 2005
News Values and Aid Work
One can’t fault the news media on getting things done. I was at Colombo airport last December with a team from Medair (a Swiss-based Christian aid agency I’ve worked with on and off for many years). But most of the other travellers, seemingly with three or four luggage trolleys a head, laden ...
Show whole article (510 words)
18 Apr 2005
Belsen - Shame for All of Us
Today we commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the day when the British army liberated prisoners held in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The bald fact, that the Nazis industrially murdered six million Jews, is one which we repeat often enough to risk its losing its power to shock. We ...
Show whole article (440 words)
19 Nov 2004
Entente? Yes; Union? Whoah
Everyone loves France: food, wine, art, landscape, fashion; intelligent hedonism, ancient culture. I grant you, you get all this cheaper, classier and with more friendly service in Italy, but one can’t have too much of a good thing. The Entente Cordiale (or “Friendly Understanding” as we say in ...
Show whole article (440 words)
18 Aug 2004
It was ever thus
One of the many good things about Dorothy L Sayers is that she is very circumstantial. Just as we might read Jane Austen to find out the detail of how the gentry lived in 1810, a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery gives you a potted social history of the year it was written.So we find that food ...
Show whole article (240 words)
11 Aug 2004
Everyday Vegetables
It's in the oven now but I'm not sure what to call it. Casserole is a bit like serviette and lounge. But the honest anglo-saxon word, my usual choice, in this case sounds unappealing - as in "in a stew" or "stewed". Hot pot is too seventies darling.
What the hey. It is what it is. ...
Show whole article (610 words)
8 Aug 2004
Pie on Earth Before You Die
Which of has not at some time felt that the Christian life was a bit too much like hard work? So often God, speaking through his church or Scripture such as we have read this morning, seems to want us to give up the things we like in everyday life in favour of something far off and supernatural ...
Show whole article (1900 words)
8 Aug 2004
Don't Put Off 'Til Tomorrow
There is an uncomfortable message that appears again and again in the Bible, including the passages we've just heard. Time and again we're told to get rid of our wealth, and concentrate on the things of the spirit. "Sell your possessions and give to the poor". "Faith is being sure of what we ...
Show whole article (650 words)
3 Aug 2004
Illustrated Tomato Soup
A pal coming for lunch seems like the stimulus I need to make a week's worth of tomato soup. As ever it starts with garlic.
It all goes in the pan with tomato paste, as Peter Clemenza will tell you, ...
Show whole article (480 words)
1 Aug 2004
Understanding Tongues
If you'll forgive me, I'm not going to go into detail about our Old Testament reading this evening. If you want to reflect on this passage perhaps I could offer one idea for your consideration. This is not just the end of the book of Genesis: it's the start of the book of Exodus. Joseph and ...
Show whole article (1900 words)
25 Jul 2004
St James the Apostle
St James, whose feast we celebrate today, is as you might say the Everyman of Apostles. If we read further on in Mark's Gospel we find him at many of the critical events. When Jesus raises the daughter of Jairus from the dead "he did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the ...
Show whole article (1550 words)
11 Jul 2004
The Samaritan
The story of the Good Samaritan is one of the best known in the Bible. It has a simple moral: that we should make ourselves practically useful to other people. We read that the Good Samaritan goes to great lengths to make sure his help is useful: he gives the inn keeper money to look after ...
Show whole article (800 words)
11 Jul 2004
Fruit of the Spirit
Everybody knows the story of the Good Samaritan. It has a simple moral: that we should make ourselves practically useful to those in trouble. The hero of the story is a Samaritan, and as you know, Samaritans are essentially good chaps. Today there is an extremely valuable voluntary agency ...
Show whole article (2050 words)
11 Jul 2004
True Worship
I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared
You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men
Can you think of somewhere you went on holiday as a child and the later, after years or even decades passed, visited again? Sometimes ...
Show whole article (1880 words)
27 Jun 2004
Change Today
Imagine how you would feel if someone close to you, a son or daughter, brother or sister, friend, began getting involved in one of those cults. Perhaps you’ve heard about them. A crowd of undesirables – drunkards, ex-convicts, illegal immigrants, women of easy virtue. They call themselves ‘the ...
Show whole article (1920 words)
26 Jun 2004
Motoring is Unfair and Confused
My mother, who in the Autumn of her years still goes by bicycle to do her shopping at Sainsbury’s in Cromwell Road, makes a modest proposal about road safety. Outlaw seatbelts. Instead, fit a large spike to every steering wheel, point toward the driver’s chest. Well, it may never catch on. ...
Show whole article (770 words)
20 Jun 2004
Your Faith Has Healed You
Your faith has healed, you, go in peace.
One of the hard things about preaching on the Bible is that there is so much in it. The two stories we've heard today are full of interest. We could go on for hours considering the tenuous chain of providential co-incidences by which Isaac ...
Show whole article (1950 words)
6 Jun 2004
Trinity Sunday
Many of us will have been thinking about historic battles this Trinity Sunday. I'd like us to cast our minds back now beyond 1944, to another battle, a spiritual battle and a battle of the mind but in its way no less momentous than Operation Overlord – a battle for the truth about God. It ...
Show whole article (2010 words)
7 May 2004
If it isn't food, don't eat it
It's déjà vu all over again in the fraught world of food labelling. Last week a health minister tongue-lashed food companies for smuggling salt and fat past our defences. In April the European Parliament came up with the proverbial "tough new rules" to make sure Low Fat Food is low in fat. ...
Show whole article (710 words)
14 Apr 2004
Votes at 16? Grow Up
Who but the most abandoned curmudgeon could long resist the ardent desire of young men and women to live out their birth right? Yet to my wrinkled hand and grating voice falls the solemn task of disillusionment. There is a harsh message for the whey-faced youth under the slogan "I can drive but not vote" in the Votes at 16 website, and though it leave his most ardent hopes stillborn, hear it he must: you are not a victim of discrimination....
Show whole article (660 words)
11 Apr 2004
A Book of Comforts for Us
If I asked you who Isaiah was, you would probably say he was a prophet. But what is a prophet? Often people think prophecy is about telling the future. But although that comes into it (as I’ll mention later), prophecy is a much more wide ranging activity. A handy definition, which I’ll ...
Show whole article (2050 words)
14 Mar 2004
Listen and Live
unless you repent you will all perish
Our Gospel reading this morning is a grim one. It starts with a mass execution. Jesus then mentions another catastrophe, when part of the fortifications of Jerusalem fell and killed eighteen people. These events were fresh in the memory of ...
Show whole article (2020 words)
8 Feb 2004
The Right Kind of Shame
Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips
Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man
This morning in our readings we read one piece of theology from St Paul, and two stories, from the Old Testament and from the Gospel. I want to concentrate mainly on the ...
Show whole article (2060 words)