Sermons

What manner of man is this? From Mark 4: 38 – 41 38 And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? 39 And He arose, and rebuked the wind...

In today’s Gospel reading we learn from Mark that the kingdom of God is like a seed that, when it grows up, will put forth large branches ‘so that the birds of the air can nest in its shade.’ When I read that particular sentence about the birds, it brought...

‘No man can enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house.’ Who is the strong man? According to the context of Mark’s gospel, he is Satan, the force of evil, and according to...

Today is Trinity Sunday.  It is on this day that we celebrate the Holy Trinity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.  We can trace the origin of this celebration back to our 12th century Archbishop of Canterbury, St Thomas Becket, whose first act as...

Ascension-Tide has wonderful hymns, one has kept coming to me as I have been revisiting the New Testament accounts of the Ascension, Lord enthroned in heavenly splendour. Let it hover in the backs of your minds for a moment. On Easter morning a parishioner emerged from church, puzzled by the...

“The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them.” The requiem’s prayers encompass emotions around death: fear, separation, love, memory, hope, thankfulness. This prayer for the dead calls the faithful to face mortality and finitude and situate them within the loving...

One of my favourite poems by John Donne, begins the third verse: I have a sin of fear…  I hope it is not inappropriate to admit that as I shut the church door on Mothering Sunday 2020, I was afraid. St Mark, has the oddest ending to his Gospel “and...

Our OT lesson is the gift of the Law to Moses. The Ten Commandments give shape to human interaction and the proper sense of the holiness of God. The Gospel reading, not from Mark this week, is from the start of John’s Gospel. Jesus comes from Galilee and as his...

Sermon Lent I, 21 February 2021, the Vicar There are elemental factors with which we must deal before we look at Mark’s telling of Jesus’s time in the wilderness. Some years ago, rather baldly, one of the children, said, “Look what you have done to the planet, that we will...

In today’s sermon I am going to attempt to reflect upon the love of God, drawing upon today’s Gospel reading and the fact that today is St Valentine’s Day.  This reflection will, I hope, offer reassurance and comfort to those who have suffered and are suffering from Covid and those...

It is an honour to embark on my maiden sermon in front of our St Mark’s communityand what a treasure trove of gospel riches I’ve been given to consider and share with youbriefly, I promise. When William sent the options for today’s readings, he noted that the Prologue to John’s...

It’s been a week of drama and worry. The storming of Capitol Hill, the relentless rise in infections. We need to be reminded of God’s loving presence and to take heart. Let me distract you for a moment. Slurp, slosh, pop, bang, screech, ding, dong: onomatopoeia. (My daughter’s name is...

It’s been a week of drama and worry. The storming of Capitol Hill, the relentless rise in infections. We need to be reminded of God’s loving presence and to take heart. Let me distract you for a moment. Slurp, slosh, pop, bang, screech, ding, dong: onomatopoeia. (My daughter’s name is...

In the current situation of being in the midst of a pandemic we long for good news.  That might be the arrival of a successful vaccine, or a steep decline in the number of people infected or, best of all, the knowledge that the virus has either burnt itself out...

The subject of the Bible is a vast one to undertake, let alone complete in 5 minutes. I want to mention one person, who in the history of the Bible stands out. His approach to it is remarkable and gives us a key to interpreting it and understanding it as...

  In the opening sentence of today’s Gospel reading, we learn that Jesus was once more going to speak to the chief priests and elders in parables.  The purpose of the parables was to teach of the kingdom of heaven by way of comparison or illustration for those who could...

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Today’s lectionary readings picture moments of destruction. Jeremiah, in his Lamentations sees the devastated wastes of Jerusalem after the Babylonians had invaded and destroyed it before the exile. The picture he paints is one of despair. Over 500 years later, Our Lord is in the Temple precincts, all newly rebuilt...

On Sunday I read a sermon that was preached in St Mark’s on Sunday 7 July 1940 and published in the August 1940 parish magazine, just one month before the church was all but destroyed (as given below with the title ‘Overheard in church’). The campaign of enemy bombing was...

In Psalm 34, a Psalm of David, which gives praise to God for deliverance from troubles, we read the sentence: ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good’. This tasting does not have the literal meaning of eating but the symbolic meaning of taking refuge in God.  Those who...

What I have observed during my preparation of sermons to preach here at St. Mark’s is that the Bible narratives are full of threads that are woven to form various patterns that make up the great tapestry of the Bible story. In reading the text of today’s Gospel, with Matthew’s...

Trinity VI 19 July 2020 Year A Proper 11 Jesus’s remarkable style as a teacher was to use pictures to capture his audience’s attention. Last week’s Gospel was the Parable of the Sower, which anyone in an agricultural society would have grasped immediately. And I thought in that vein I...

Jesus’s remarkable style as a teacher was to use pictures to capture his audience’s attention. Last week’s Gospel was the Parable of the Sower, which anyone in an agricultural society would have grasped immediately. And I thought in that vein I might use some pictures too, which while not of...

Next week we shall return to church, but before we do, here we are gathered in this virtual way, safely distanced, but together. We are worshipping as perhaps three months ago we might never have imagined. And we are poised on the threshold of our beloved St Mark’s. We are...