Who is to be trusted these days? There seems to be a lot of pretense and we end up feeling we’ve had the wool pulled over our eyes. Who will give us basic respect and dignity? Who will listen to us – really listen – without pretense, or the glazing over of the eyes? Who…Continue reading Sermon for Trinity Sunday

It’s five months since Christmas – where does the time go? Then, we celebrated the incarnation – God came to dwell with humanity – perhaps the most widely celebrated Chrsitian festival. If Christmas were to be a bookend, today, we put the second one in place at the other end of the row – the…Continue reading

There is something about trees which grips my imagination – I hope you share my enthusiasm. I think it all began for me with a programme by David Bellamy when I was a teenager. It was all about what you might call the ‘engineering’ of trees – how much pressure it takes for water to…Continue reading

I’ve just been away on holiday. I suppose any holiday in the English Lake District will inevitably involve encounters with sheep. I saw plenty of the beautiful Herdwick sheep which are such a feature of the Lake District fells, and there were lots of lambs. One day I stopped at a smallholding where there were…Continue reading Sermon for Easter 4

A few weeks ago, an image of The Sacred Heart of Jesus was left on the Vicarage steps, with no indication of who it was from or why they had left it there. My instinct was that this was something to which I had to give my attention, so I put it on my desk…Continue reading Sermon notes Easter 2

Images of suffering There have been countless images, in the last few weeks, of terrible suffering. Perhaps foremost amongst them in my mind was a picture of a Ukrainian mother, holding a photograph of her teenage son, who had been shot dead in front of her by Russian soldiers. She had to dig his grave…Continue reading Good Friday Sermon

East West Street I have been re-reading East West Street by Philippe Sands: an account of the lives of two men who introduced the terms Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity into international law. Both men were Jewish, both lived in the Ukrainian town now known as Lviv in the first half of the C20th. Along…Continue reading Sermon for Palm Sunday

I was talking to my mum this week about the lady who used to come and help her with the cleaning – a cheerful and kind woman who lived in terrible poverty and was married to a violent and abusive man. Their son died as a young man as an indirect result of the beatings…Continue reading Sermon for Mothering Sunday 2022

Noise! At a hospital appointment on Monday morning I was dismayed by the noise. There was a TV on somewhere – a sitcom with canned laughter but meaningless because the screen wasn’t visible. At the other end of the ward there was a radio playing, and then some people came in with a child and…Continue reading Sermon for the first Sunday in Lent