Last Sunday in his splendid sermon for the feast of Christ the King, David brought us to the end of the Christian year. So today it falls to me to start off a new Christian year, the first Sunday of the season of Advent.

This is not an easy task. The poem “Wachet auf” by the poet Ann Lewin sum it up:

Advent.

Season when 

Dual citizenship

Holds us in

Awkward tension.

The world intent on

Spending Christmas,

Eats and drinks its way to

Oblivion after dinner:

The kingdom sounds 

Insistent warnings:

Repent, be ready, 

Keep awake, 

He comes...

My kingdom is not from this world

In September 1974, Archbishop Michael Ramsey was invited to visit the Anglican church in Chile. He must have felt some trepidation because the year before the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende has been overthrown in a military coup, and the country was now under the control of a repressive dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. Ramsey was invited to preach in an Anglican church, and a journalist from The Observer turned up for the occasion. There was an armed guard outside the church and when the journalist left at the end of the service the...

There is in the penultimate programme in the Poirot finale series the following line of dialogue which is actually a quote from Goethe:

‘The threshold is the place to pause’

It strikes me as being rather pertinent for today and our AGM meeting, coming as it does near the end of one Christian Year and the beginning of the next. These words encourage us to stop, pause and reflect, for a moment before continuing.

An AGM is about taking stock of the past year; giving thanks to God for blessings received and beginning the planning for year ahead and the...

This morning I am going to do something which I have never done before in this church and probably will never do again. I am going to read to you the sermon which my late husband Alex wrote and preached on Remembrance Sunday several years ago. I have made no changes to the original, though there are some things which now are distinctly out of date.

This is not laziness on my part. In this sermon, Alex says all that I could want to say, and he says it far better than I ever could. When I heard him preach...

What are we doing as we commemorate the saints and remember our loved ones departed? Simply put, we are remembering with gratitude those who we have known and loved who have died and gone to God before us and we are giving thanks for those deemed to be saints and asking for their prayers as we try to live a good Christian life. The saints are those named by the church as being good examples to us of how to live a life dedicated to the service of Christ and to God’s people. They range from the obscure and eccentric...