Today the church invites us to celebrate the Saints—all of them! What, then, is a Saint? As what are sometimes called "Bible-believing Christians" (not, incidentally, a description with which I am entirely happy, since Christians are people who believe in the Triune God rather than...
Some time ago I watched the movie Moonstruck. Mostly it’s just a pleasant romantic comedy about a woman who begins with the wrong man and ends up with the right one. Nothing very remarkable about that! It’s a story Jane Austen told, in one form...
Martha and Mary of Bethany and their brother Lazarus were evidently dear friends of our Lord. They crop up in the synoptic gospels as well as in John, so they must have been important to Jesus. If you want to know how I picture Martha and...
I remember some time ago watching a man on television speaking about mass shootings that had taken place in Christchurch, New Zealand on 15 March 2019—shootings carried out by a single person during Muslim Friday Prayers, first at the Al Noor Mosque in Riccarton and...
At that very hour some Pharisees came, and said to Jesus, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." 32. And he said to them, "Go and tell that fox, See, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and...
I would like to spend a few minutes with you thinking about the creation story from Genesis which we heard in our first reading—the first of two creation stories with which our Bibles begin. I intend to do this, not by wasting time in discussion...
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...
Epiphany 3. For the OT Nehemiah 8.1-3, 5-6, 8-10; for the Psalm 19; for the Gospel Luke 4.14-21 Three things one quite often hears said about Christian revelation. The first is this: “Christian revelation is through the Bible and only through the Bible.” The Latin tag “sola...
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...
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...