Living Water

My sermon for last Sunday, the Third Sunday of Lent, Year A:

One of the commonest metaphors in the Bible is the metaphor of hunger and thirst. Spiritually we have a need for God parallel to our physical need for food and water.

Jesus employed that metaphor when he said that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God, and he uses the same kind of image here when he says that whoever drinks ordinary water will get thirsty again, whereas the water that he gives will turn into a spring, welling up to eternal life.

Our spiritual journey

My sermon for last Sunday, 2nd Sunday in Lent, Year A:

You could say that the readings today are about three journeys: Abraham's, Christ's, and ours.

The first reading describes an ancient and mysterious event: God's call to Abraham to uproot himself, to leave his old country and his old way of life behind and to set off for a new country and a new life under God's direction.

Reception into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church

Yesterday at the 4.30pm Mass Alex Rae was received into the Church and confirmed. After Mass we had a party in the house to celebrate. We managed to get a lot of photographs of the occasion and even some videos of parts of the Mass. Here are some of them.

The World, the Flesh and the Devil

The Devil presenting St Augustine with the Book of Vices

My sermon for the First Sunday of Lent, Year A:

The readings today, appropriately enough for the beginning of the penitential season of Lent, revolve around the weakness of our human nature, our inclination towards sin and self-seeking, and our susceptibility to temptation. They invite us to reflect on the wisdom, the realism and the compassion of Christian spirituality on these subjects, especially on what we might call the psychology of temptation.

Lent: our annual spiritual refresher course

My sermon for Ash Wednesday:

Every celebration of Mass begins with the Penitential Rite, as we call it. We prepare to meet Christ and receive Christ in the Eucharist by pausing for a moment, right at the start of Mass, and turning our attention to our faults, our weaknesses, the areas of our life where we fall short of the standard of Christian holiness. We apologise to God and we ask him to give us strength in our future struggles.

Lent is a whole season of the Church Year dedicated to this aspect of Christian spiritual life.

"De-chavving" the car park

The bushes around the car park had gradually grown very tall and, following a suggestion at the last parish council meeting, I arranged to have them cut down a bit, making the car park and the church entrance far more visible from the street.

"Worldly prudence"

Mr Worldly Wiseman from Bunyan's  
The Pilgrim's Progress

An addendum to Sunday's sermon, courtesy of F.P. Harton in his book The Elements of the Spiritual Life. The book was first published in 1932 and Harton, an Anglican clergyman and sometime Dean of Wells Cathedral, obviously belonged to the High Church party of the Church of England. My second-hand copy is a 1957 reprint, but the book is apparently available in a modern edition.

A house built on rock

My sermon for the 9th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A:

The gospel reading today brings to a close a long and important section of Saint Matthew's Gospel: Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.

This great exposition of Jesus' moral teaching covers chapters five, six and seven of Matthew's Gospel and there are some disadvantages in dividing it into several short segments, as in the gospel readings for Mass over the last five or six Sundays. It's a good idea to read all three chapters together, to get a picture of the whole charter of Christian moral life, or the way of God's Kingdom.

Consider the lilies....

My sermon for last Sunday, 8th in Ordinary Time, Year A:

There's a story about one of the hermits living in the desert in the fourth or fifth century, who came back to his hermitage one day to find a couple of robbers making off with his few possessions. Instead of protesting or trying to stop them, he began to help them remove his few goods from the house. He seemed to look on the experience of being robbed as a test of his vow of poverty or an opportunity to show, even to himself, his level of non-attachment to material things.