June 2020

Trinity III 28th June 2020  Year A Proper 8

Jeremiah 28:5-9

When I read this short passage from Jeremiah I noticed something that I had never noticed before. That fact, that this is about two prophets having a discussion about theology and what God is going to do in the future.

In the previous chapter of Jeremiah there is much talk about the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews and how the King Nebuchadnezzar took most of the sacred vessels from the temple in Jerusalem with him, when he invaded and subdued the people. Jeremiah reminds the people that Nebuchadnezzar did not...

Romans 6:1b-11 for Father’s Day

By the Rev'd David Warnes

“He’s the image of his father!” Those words are sometimes used by proud grandparents when they recognise that a new-born baby looks very much as his father did in early infancy. They pithily sum up the Swiss-German theologian Karl Barth’s important insights about the fatherhood of God.

Father’s Day challenges us to think about what it means to us to speak of God as Father. It is, like all the language we used about God, a metaphor, and metaphors can both illuminate and distort. Much will depend on our individual...

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8  Everything Has Its Time

3 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 
² a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 
³ a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up; 
⁴ a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 
⁵ a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace...

A sermon for The First Sunday after Trinity 2020

Romans 5:1-8

In his novel “Time Regained” Marcel Proust describes the search for the heart of any experience. Most of us go though life with little insight into the essence of our life because we spend little time below the surface of our day to day existence. Although our lives are necessarily mundane much of the time, occasionally we are caught unawares and our understanding is illuminated for a moment by a glimpse of something deep and mysterious.

This is true not only for religious people who practice their faith but...

In my daily reading of the Rule of St.Benedict I was struck recently by the 'Eighth Step of Humility'. St.Benedict says:

"The eighth step of humility is that we do only what is endorsed by the common rule of the monastery and the example set by the prioress or abbot."            

'Life with St.Benedict   Richard Frost'

Frost in his commentary goes on to remind the reader that learning from others is an integral part of who we are as human beings. I was struck how true his words are. It is in deed from...

Trinity Sunday 2020

What is the Holy Trinity?

I suppose the first response could be; ‘Well that’s a very good question? Can you give me a few thousand years to get back to you with a definitive answer?’  Which is basically, what the Church has been doing since the resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit at that first Pentecost.

The second response could be much simpler; ‘The Trinity is an expression of love.’ What I mean by that, is that if we believe that God is ultimately love, then the three ways in which God...