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The gates of Hades will not prevail - a sermon for the Solemnity of Peter and Paul, Apostles

Just over a year ago, I joined the Bishop of Southwark and a number of other curates on a visit to the Holy Land. On one of the afternoons, we went to the very spot where today’s Gospel is set – Caesarea Philippi. This site, at the foot of Mount Hermon and about thirty miles from the Sea of Galilee, is now little more than few old caves and a sparklingly clear river, the main inhabited area destroyed in the Six Day War of 1967. It is tempting to see this now picturesque, bucolic, and rather deserted location as the backdrop for Peter’s unusually perceptive declaration that Jesus truly was ‘the Messiah, the Son of the living God’, but whilst that would make a good Disney version of the Gospels, nothing could be further from the truth. For at the time Our Lord walked on the Earth, Caesarea Philippi was an awful lot more than a beauty spot.   Caesarea Philippi was very much the administrative capital of the local area, and – as its name suggests – Caesarea – it was very much a place o
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The Holy Night

  My brothers and sisters, we meet tonight to celebrate the most extraordinary of truths. We meet to proclaim nothing less than the reality at the centre of the universe, that God, the creator of all there is and was and shall ever be, who loved you and me into being and who continues to sustain us without cost, without favour, with nothing more than the beating heart of grace, that this very God was born in a stable, to a forgotten woman, of a despised and imprisoned nation.     We meet to proclaim our faith in the Word made flesh – a Word that was in the beginning with God, a Word that was with God, a Word that was God. We meet here, in this ordinary place, in this ordinary time, to proclaim to the world that against all the odds, against all appearances, impossibly, even, that the extraordinary of God has burst forth into the ordinary of the world, burst forth not in rage or in anger, not in power or in might, but in the simple act of a baby’s birth.    God incarnate, born of the wo
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Rejoice in justice - sermon for Advent III

  ‘Woke Christianity will kill the Church of England stone dead’.   So reads the headline of the most recent of the endless, tiresome, and frankly rather silly hit pieces that our newspapers appear to love to print in the run up to Christmas. ‘Congregants don’t want to be preached to about politics, & they certainly don’t want drag queens. What they want is the full-fat version of faith’, it screeches in faux outrage, getting into full pantomime mode. ‘ Drag queens are not the answer’, it tells in increasingly bewildering absurdity. ‘The churches still thriving are those that refuse to pander to the Left’.   Now I will admit that I probably agree with the author that drag queens – at least by themselves – are not likely to be the salvation of Mother Church. In fact, like Jesus, I don’t really have much to say about drag queens at all, except to suggest that the clergy – dressed as we are – ought perhaps to be the last to throw stones. Yet such a convenien
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Imagine...

  Imagine with me, for a moment, a church that spoke to the world as it is rather than the way it wishes it was. Imagine, even, a church that listened rather than always spoke. Imagine a church that looked at everybody, whoever they were, and recognised the image of God in them. Imagine a church that looked for goodness rather than turned its face away in case because it felt uncomfortable. Imagine a church that saw each and every person as a child of God, beloved of God, holy and blessed and welcomed by the God we serve.   For a long time, those of us who think LGBTQIA lives and loves are held within the heart of God have expended time, energy, effort, arguing for a place at the table. We have become apologists, arguing on others’ terms to show that we’re not the second class citizens, at best, and the wilful destroyers of the church, at worst, that we’re painted as being. We have faced opposition at every turn, from bishops, from church authorities, from fellow
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Justice, generosity, and the God of all

 Hard as it is to imagine now, given my athletic physique and sporting prowess, but when I was a child I was rather partial to pie. I didn’t really care what type of pie it was – sweet, savoury, ideally both together in the same meal. The only thing I did worry about was whether there would be enough for me.   All of our lives seem to feature this kind of pie, in one way or another. However old we get, however wise we think we are, we can never quite shake that fear of losing out. The finite nature of the world continues to scare us – the scarceness of resources, whether that is a genuine, real or a perceived threat. There is only so much to go around, and we’ll be damned if we lose our slice.   This Sunday is celebrated as Racial Justice Sunday in many churches around the country. That celebration is as much of an aspiration as anything else – all of us know that racial justice remains a dream that we yearn for rather than something for which to be congratulated. And that ever
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A response to ‘The Church of England’s Doctrine of Marriage’, +Fulham et al

  I thought it might be useful to offer a few thoughts on the most recent paper by a number of bishops, of differing theologies and yet in opposition to same-sex marriage. The original paper can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aYyMitqZL7c0ftjxM3_maGmptBzVVz_D/view .   It’s notable that these bishops come from different theological stables, which probably does give some indication as to why the resulting theology here is so disappointingly light and unconvincing. It appears to lack a coherence theological thread and suffers because of it. Nonetheless, it is good that bishops are finally willing to say what they think – even if we might disagree with it. The risk of saying what you think, of course, is that your arguments are open to challenge. This is my small offering in that regard.   In the first instance, the paper does not offer what it claims to offer – ‘a relatively short theological summary of the doctrine of marriage as the Church of
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