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Many people who know me have heard me talk about Father John Crisp, who was my parish priest when I was a teenager at St Mark's Church, Marylebone Road in the 1950s. And some will have noticed that the statue of Our Lady in the...

03 February, 2022

The Armour of God. For Exeter Central Parishes (13th after Pentecost 2021). The parish has been reflecting in previous weeks on the lectionary readings from the Letter to the Ephesians, which is in its form perhaps originally a circular (or even, “encyclical”) rather than a letter...

22 August, 2021

Proper 12 B: 2 Samuel 11.1-15. One reason I love the Scriptures is that they never duck away from the fact that there’s real evil in the world, including in those whom we think of as the best and the brightest. And that thought brings me...

22 July, 2021

Proper 17A. For the Gospel: Matthew 16.21-28 This morning’s gospel belongs very closely with the gospel story we heard last week. Last week, you may remember, we heard Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter’s response—what we sometimes call his “confession”: “You...

28 August, 2020

Proper 15, Year A.  For the Gospel: Matthew 15.22-28 You sometimes hear people who think that they are being marvellously orthodox saying things like, “If Jesus was God, he must have known everything.” Actually, when they say things like that they aren’t being orthodox at all. They’re...

13 August, 2020

I’ve been a priest now for nearly sixty years, and during the whole of that time this is the strangest Easter I’ve known. I’m told it’s the church’s job to give hope, and no doubt it is. But hope for what? For a return to...

11 April, 2020