The word "Apology" has changed meaning. In ye olde days it simply meant "a defence", or "an argument supporting". Below are my last sermons on 4 January 2026, thanking St Margaret's for their confidence in my ministry and partnership in the Gospel and praying for their future flourishing. I would like to begin by sharing the vicarage's favourite joke: There are three cows in a field: pardon, pardon-pardon and pardon-pardon-pardon. Pardon-pardon and pardon-pardon-pardon leave the field. Who...

by the Revd Dr Brutus Green ‘Hell is empty. And all the devils are here.’ A line from Shakespeare’s Tempest.   You can hear an echo in the Italian writer Gramsci, who was recently quoted by Rutger Bregman, who memorably called President Trump: the most openly corrupt president in American history, which was then awkwardly edited out by the BBC, who are never completely sure which direction they are facing. Gramsci wrote: ‘The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, now is...

Lamorna Ash, who is a voice of her generation, tapping the zeitgeist , in her last book uses the story of Jacob wrestling the angel as a metaphor for her explorations within Christianity – a wrestling with faith – ‘my personal match with Christianity’, as she puts it. Sometimes it made life better, sometimes harder; It changed everything, it changed nothing. “All that wrestling, though” she says, “it was exhausting.”   She takes faith seriously; It’s what I’ve heard young people call a “deep...