Why thinking about our last end needn't be morbid.
Monday, October 19, 2026
Saturday, October 17, 2026
Will you Luke at that?
Sermon for the Feast of St Luke
Have you noticed that St Luke doesn't appear in the canon of the Mass?
We have the apostles, including St Paul.
We have early bishops of Rome, like St Linus, St Cletus, St Clement and St Xystus. We have other bishops and martyrs like St Cornelius and St Cyprian, St Barnabus, St Ignatius, St Lucy and St Anastasia, even St Chrysogonus!
But no St Luke the Evangelist.
Granted also that neither does St Mark appear, nor even St Joseph.
Why not?
[PAUSE]
It does seem odd that the Church does not include the writer of the most historically detailed Gospel. St Luke is a magnificent historian of his time. Modern historians such as Ramsay, Harnack, Cadbury and Sherwin-White class St Luke as being of great importance and value. His Gospel is history, biography and theology rolled into one.
Yet he is not good enough to include in the canon of the Mass.
No, that's not true, and St Luke himself shows why.
How many disciples are there?
"Twelve, if you count Judas," everyone says enthusiastically!
Nope!
St Luke points out that there are at least seventy who are being sent out to spread the Gospel of Our Lord's presence among us in the neighbouring towns and cities.
Do we know their names?
Possibly there are lists out there with their names including that of St Aristobulus.
Who?
According to second century sources, St Aristobulus was sent to Britain after the day of Pentecost which means that the Church in England has existed from the first century.
But he seems to be forgotten too.
There are more names than we can.handle. We can't recite all the relevant saints or we would distract ourselves from the business of the Mass itself. We have to limit whose names we read out.
But we also have feast days like St Luke's today where we can thank.him and thank God for him and his witness to the Truth.
He is certainly not forgotten. Morning and Evening prayer contain those most important Gospel canticles which St Luke recorded: the Benedictus, the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis. He is there in the Litany listed among the apostles and evangelists. It is not an insult that he is not in the canon of the Mass for St Luke himself wants us to focus on the mystery unfolding before our very eyes - the same mystery that he bears witness to in his Gospel.
And yes we are allowed to think of St Luke as we read his words. He is a saint worth getting to know as he tells us categorically not just of what he witnessed but the people he associates with. He introduces us to Our Lady from whom he tells the story of Our Lord's birth. He introduces us to St Peter and St John who tell us of the events of the Gethsemane and the words spoken at the cross.
He introduces us to the closes circle of Our Lord's friends who themselves draw us in further to meet the Christ Himself.
[PAUSE]
St Luke doesn't need his name in the canon of the Mass. He just wants us to meet Christ which is exactly what the Mass is for.
Monday, October 12, 2026
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Minding the open book
Sermon preached at the Cathedral Church of St Augustine of Canterbury on the nineteenth Sunday after Trinity
Tubbo the Clown
is performing at Mia's party.
He gives Mia's mummy
a pack of cards
and asks her to pick a card
memorise it
and put it
back in the pack
without telling him.
After some over theatrical
moans and groans,
waving of hands
and a rubber chicken,
Tubbo says,
"eight of diamonds!"
"Yes!" exclaims Mia's mummy
Cue much applause
and bowing and tripping over
big clown shoes.
How does he do it?
Can Tubbo really
read minds?
[PAUSE]
The more sceptical of us
might suggest that
he can't.
We would probably say
that he is using
a rigged deck of cards.
He might be using
the reflection
in Mia's mummy's glasses.
Or perhaps,
he is using some
deep psychological trick.
[PAUSE,]
Mind reading acts
these days
rely on careful observation
of a person.
Knowing how
people act normally
and how they react
unconsciously to
various events,
can give a gifted observer
a good idea of what
people are thinking.
Just subtle little mannerisms
can expose to an eagle-eye
what we are thinking.
Poker players call these
little signs 'tells'
because they use them to
tell if someone is bluffing.
We're very used to this
with the people closest to us.
"That face" on a parent
usually means
that you have done something wrong.
[PAUSE]
What, then, are we to make
of Our Lord
knowing the thoughts
of the scribes
who are watching Him
heal a man with the palsy.
Is this an act of mind reading,
or has He seen "that face"
on the scribes
when He forgives
the paralysed man
his sins.
Do the scribes
have a "tell"?
We can understand
if this is the case.
We can see the sneers,
the raised eyebrows,
the hands balling
into fists.
And we can tell
that they are taking issue
with Our Lord's authority
to forgive sins.
We don't need to read minds
to know what they are thinking.
So perhaps Our Lord
isn't a mind reader at all.
Except...
[PAUSE]
He is.
But the minds being read
aren't just
the minds of the scribes.
Right at the beginning,
all we see is a paralysed man
being brought to
Our Lord by friends.
We see their faith in Jesus.
What we don't see
is that the man
needs forgiveness
in order to be healed.
Our Lord is the first to admit
that not every illness
is the result of sin.
But equally,
some illnesses
might be the result
of sin.
How does Our Lord know
that forgiving this man's sin
will heal him?
[PAUSE]
Our Lord knows his thoughts.
And He knows the thoughts
of the scribes.
He knows our thoughts
because He knows us.
He knows our "tells".
He knows our triggers.
He knows our deepest
darkest thoughts.
Got a deep dark secret?
Sonething you want
to keep hidden?
Something which would
mortify you if someone else knows?
Well, sorry,
Our Lord knows it.
Does that make you
uncomfortable?
Why?
[PAUSE]
If God knows our shame,
why is that a problem?
What we see here in front of us,
is a God Who doesn't raise
His eyebrows,
doesn't tut-tut,
doesn't condemn,
but seeks to heal.
He wants to make us better.
He wants to forgive our sins.
But we need to come to Him
or be carried to Him
in order to find
the healing of our souls
through the forgiveness
of our sins.
We are sinners.
We know that
and we have a tendency
to scold others
or sneer at others
or avoid others
because of their sins.
But God is not like that.
And He doesn't want us to be like that.
This is why priests
cannot reveal
what is told them in confession.
God wants us
to confess to Him
and not be ashamed
of coming to confession.
We should be ashamed
of sinning.
We should not be ashamed
of repenting
of confessing
of wanting to be healed.
Because God is not
ashamed of creating us
as the Incarnation,
Death and Resurrection
proves in spades.
[PAUSE]
God reads our minds
because He knows us.
The converse is also true.
If we know God,
we know His mind too.
We can read the Mind of God
if we choose to.
But that means a life of
searching for Him
and seeking His "tell"
which can only be found
in the Word of God.
Monday, October 05, 2026
Sunday, October 04, 2026
Thank God for chicken sandwiches!
Sermon for harvest festival
How much is
a chicken sandwich,
these days?
Would you buy one for £1?
Okay if it's one of
Mrs Miggins' sandwiches
at a fundraising lunch,
but not if it's from
Scabby Joe's cart
behind the bins at Tesco's.
£2?
£5?
£10?
That would have
to be a good one!
What about $1500?
Would you buy
a chicken sandwich
for $1500?
[PAUSE]
What's it made from?
Bread made
at the hands of 1000 dusky maidens
(or handsome young men,
if you prefer)?
Chicken directly descended
from the court of Henry VIII?
Butter from
the real Ermintrude the Cow
from the Magic Roundabout?
But a chicken sandwich
does cost $1500
and this has been proved.
[PAUSE]
A man
- a youtuber -
has shown that
the cost of making
a chicken sandwich
from scratch costs
that amount of money.
He bought the wheat,
sowed it,
grew it,
did all that farmers do
to make it grow
into normal wheat.
He reared
and killed a chicken,
himself.
He made the butter
from a cow he milked himself.
He even added
all the sweetners
and preservatives
that go into a chicken sandwich.
All this cost him $1500.
What does this tell you?
[PAUSE]
We rely so much
on the labour of others
for the fact that
we can go to the fridge,
take out a chicken sandwich
and eat it
without sparing a single thought
for all the work
that has gone into
getting that sandwich
into our fridge in the first place.
And then we moan
when we have to go to work.
[PAUSE]
We see here
the sheer complexity
that forms our economy.
No longer are we
subsistence farmers
eking out a meagre existence
through days of back-breaking labour
in order to have
only just enough
to eat in the evening.
But our labour is hard, today.
We still have to worry about
getting enough money
in our pockets in order
to put food on the table.
That worry is not just
in terms of physical produce,
but streams of
data, cashflow
and numbercrunching.
And, as we are finding
in our sophisticated digital age,
whatever we produce
is still not immune
from the effects of
the weather, war or robbery.
And we worry.
We become anxious
about the work we do,
whether it's enough,
whether we can cope
with the demands made on us
for our labour.
As good Christians,
we bring our worries
and the worries of the world
to God.
And what does God say?
[PAUSE]
He shows us lilies
and sparrows.
"Ah! It's alright for Him,
He doesn't need to eat.
He can just magic up some food!"
"Why doesn't He magic up
some food
for us all?"
These folk have missed the point.
It is our labour together
that means that chicken sandwiches
do not cost $1500.
If we choose to invest our work
with the work of others
then we reap the rewards
which we can share.
Our labour is not worth nothing.
It certainly is not worth nothing to God.
[PAUSE]
Work became hard for us at the Fall.
God did not arbitrarily curse us
with hard labour
when we ate of the fruit
from the tree of knowledge
of good and evil.
We effectively cursed ourselves
by injecting laziness,
cheating,
fraud,
corner-cutting,
avarice and theft
into our work.
How much of our work exists
just in order
to protect ourselves
from each other?
[PAUSE]
And God shows us sparrows
to remind us that
He does care and,
if we seek Him
and His righteousness first,
we will have more than we need.
He shows us lilies
to remind us that
His Creation is beautiful
and,
perhaps,
we should bask
in its beauty so as
to want to work
to keep it nice.
God gives us motivation
to invest our labour in His creation
for love of Him,
and that He promises
what the world cannot
- a huge return on
that investment.
Often,
our attitude to labour
needs careful and serious review.
Here,
at our harvest festival,
such as it is,
we give thanks to God
for His goodness
in providing the harvest
as well as blessing those
who gathered that harvest.
This is right and proper.
But do we see
the part we play in that harvest?
Is there a part we should play
in that harvest?
Monday, September 28, 2026
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