Here goes...

In the current crisis around Coronavirus, I have been reflecting on St Paul’s trinity of Christian virtues: Faith, Hope and Love, and how they might frame our Christian response to the crisis in our communities: FAITH : We are in uncharted territory where there is no clear trajectory for spread of Coronavirus and no obvious cure as yet. Yet our Christian faith tells us that we can trust the God who holds our times in his hands. We do not believe that the world is governed by blind fate or random chance but Providence – the sure and trustworthy hand of the God of Jesus Christ working his purposes out through all the confusing and bewildering swings of history. Fear can be as infectious as the disease, so why don’t we try to counter it with the even more infectious influence of faith? Faith, especially during this time of Lent, urges us to pray with greater urgency, as the church has always done in times like this in the past, for those at the frontline in the N...

Lent is traditionally a time we think about sin. Of course, we think we know what sin is, who are the saints and who are the sinners. Jimmy Saville & Harvey Weinstein = sinners. Mother Teresa & Jean Vanier = saints.   Or so it seemed.  What Jean Vanier did with  l’Arche  was remarkable, as I tried to explain  in an article I wrote in Unherd  when he died. To create a set of communities across the world based on the conviction that mental or physical abilities bear no relation to the value and beauty of an individual human being was extraordinary. So the news that over a period of 35 years, he abused at least six different women is devastating, first and foremost to the women who suffered at his hands, who still live with the effects of his behaviour, but in a lesser way for the many who thought of him as someone as near as you might get to a modern saint. The discovery that someone who displayed a level of compassion and love beyond which ...

This is the text of a sermon preached at St Paul's Cathedral on Thursday 2nd May 2019, when  the  Cathedral was celebrating St Mellitus' Day If it wasn’t for St Mellitus we would not be here. Let me explain. Christianity came to these islands in the 2nd century, and apparently there were bishops around this area near the Thames from that time onwards, but the records and the dates of those early leaders of the church in Britain are very uncertain.  It is the Venerable Bede who tells the famous story of Pope Gregory going to the market in Rome and seeing some young slaves with “fair complexion, handsome faces and lovely hair.” He asked where they came from, and was told they came from the island of Britain. He asked were the British Christians, and was told (inaccurately as it happens) that the country was still pagan. He then asked what was the name of their race, and was told they were Angli. His well-known reply was: “Good – they have the face of angels and s...

During Advent we have been reminded of the tension between waiting patiently for the coming of Christ, and the urgency of knowing that ‘the times are short’. We are all aware of the anxieties in our national life over recent weeks, and the sense that we are living in a time that could set directions for many decades to come. It leads us to hold our nation in prayer this Christmas and to extend the invitation to know the peace of Christ in a time when there is precious little peace around. It also teaches us to base our hope not in the prospect of Brexit or the European Union or in any other human construct, but in Christ and his kingdom that is not of this world. The great mystery of the Incarnation is that in Christ, God’s glory shines, not despite his humanity, but precisely through his humanity. And that means that ordinary human flesh like yours and mine, when it is conformed to the image of Christ, is capable of displaying the glory of God – through simple gestures of love an...

For many years I struggled to understand what we Christians mean by freedom. We talk about how Jesus sets you free, that faith brings freedom and yet we also talk about obedience to God’s law, or submission to his will which doesn’t sound much like freedom. At the same time I was aware of how much our culture values freedom, yet its ideas of personal freedom often clash with a longing for our societies to be a bit more cohesive and integrated, which would presumably require a certain limiting of personal freedom. I suspected I wasn't alone in thinking about all this, and so a few years ago decided to think more deeply about the theme. What I discovered was that the Christian idea of freedom is so much richer, positive, and constructive than secular ideas of freedom, even though they sound superficially more attractive and liberating. The result was a book - Bound to be Free: The Paradox of Freedom , which was published by Bloomsbury last year. A little while ago I gave ...

July 5, 1948 was a great day in British history. It was the day on which Areurin Bevan, the Health Secretary announced the creation of the National Health Service. The NHS was one of the great triumphs of post-war British life. It is remarkable that out of the trauma of the Second World War, such a vision could emerge of universal health care, free at the point of delivery. At the same time it is perhaps an illustration of the fact that out of suffering and trouble, great ideas and visions can be born. It was perhaps another surprise to all of us when the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, Danny Boyle chose the NHS, as one of the key factors of British life to be celebrated at that moment when 1 billion people around the world was watching. It was an inspired choice, and one that in the UK at least received enthusiastic approval.  Americans of course found it much more perplexing. It has been one of the points of real cultural difference - we can never quite understand t...

This is the text of a sermon preached at St Clement's church North Kensington on the occasion of the blessing of a garden for Peace, Healing and Justice on the 10th June 2018,  the  week of  the  one-year anniversary of  the  Grenfell Tower fire.  In the Bible there are three important trees, one at the beginning, one at the end, one in the middle. The first was mentioned in our reading from the book of Genesis - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is a tree that represents the choice placed before us -  the choice to turn towards God, towards life and all that is good, or to turn away from him towards the darkness. As the story unfolds, it relates that fateful choice, repeated so many times since, to turn away from God, and love, and goodness, and instead to those destructive patterns of behaviour which lead to so much misery in our world. This tree therefore becomes a symbol of the tragedy at the heart of human life, our t...