It begins in mystery and ends in mystery.We enter the world crying, gasping for air, and one day we leave it with a sigh, returning, perhaps, to the same quiet we came from. Between those two moments lies everything: joy and sorrow, love and loss, laughter and pain. We are like twins in the womb, living in a world we think we understand, not knowing that beyond the veil of what we see lies something more. There’s an old story about twins in their mother’s womb. They live in

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 peo

The church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.   Words by TS Eliot that are always on my mind. At the first church I served in, the vicar, introducing the parish, told me, “ we lose a third of the congregation every year, as people leave central London. That means, just to stay still, you need to grow the congregation by a third each and every year.” Putney is more stable, but judging by Oberon’s class, which has dropped fr

I’m going to embarrass people. People often think the British are squeamish about sex. But actually they’re really squeamish about the ‘sordid subject of money’ which anthropologist Kate Fox calls out as a taboo, resulting from the peculiar British characteristics of ‘social-unease, modesty, hypocrisy and class-consciousness’ (559). She reports how an American-immigrant she knew had resorted to only discussing money in letters and emails as the English found it impossible to

There are two facts, two doctrines if you like, on which Christianity, as a philosophy, a religion, a world-view, depends and takes all its meaning.  The second is  the birth of Christ, the Incarnation,  But we can’t start talking about Christmas yet. The first and most definitive fact is the Creation, or more precisely, creatio   ex nihilo, creation from nothing. This separates Christians from two sets of other belief. On the one hand are the pantheists and pagans. The moder

1Tim 1:12-17, Luke 15:1-10 I believe in the forgiveness of sins.   I like to think of myself as a modern man. And us modern men have learned that listening is important – and so to curtail our problem-solving-instinct and our helpful… suggestions. So when Rhiannon texted me from an online meeting in the top of the house: “Desperate for a massive glass of squash.” I immediately knew how a modern man responds. I texted back: “Do you want me to listen, or to fix it.” [I had a

My preteen years were in the 1970s. At school, we read Ladybird books about Peter and Jane’s domestic adventures. A packet of crisps cost...

Trinity 6 Proper 12 27th July 2025 Writing a sermon is never just about finding the right words. For me, it always starts in prayer, and...

Petertide is a season that carries deep personal meaning for me. Traditionally, it's the time when many in the Church of England having...

It all began with Peter Pan I was 5, in the Scala theatre near Tottenham Court Road I was captivated I was lost My love of the theatre...

And such a sweetness and power rolled about them and over them and entered into them that they felt they had never really been happy or...

What must it have been like for the disciples to see their beloved leader, their Messiah, to vanish into a cloud. Just when they had got...

Waiting to be hung on a wall in my flat is this little picture of a church. I don’t know who gave it to my parents, but I know why. It is...

’A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp,...

Seven years ago I took a training course in the army that happily offered five weeks off from admin and emails and a good deal of fresh...

The story we tell this evening, is, in its way, a story of grief. It’s a story of love and letting go. It’s a story that begins with the...

Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’  She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ which means Teacher.    In the name of the Father and of...

want to begin this morning by sharing a little personal reflection. I live in Manor Fields, at the top of Putney Hill. It's a lovely...

As I sat at my desk on Friday morning, writing this sermon, I found myself feeling really tired. My desk, once neat and organized, was...

The Grace of Anna and the Faith of Simeon Anna means ‘grace,’ and Simeon means ‘to hear’ or ‘to listen.’ These two figures from the...