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A sermon in 2 parts for All Saints Day

  Reading one: Luke 6: 20-31 Talk 1 You don’t need me to tell you it’s a difficult time of the year – as the evenings get dark ever more quickly, the weather gets more wintry, and as we face news of the death of loved ones, and our diaries seem to fill up with funerals.   In all that gloom, All Saints Day (which was yesterday) and All Soul’s Day (which is today) shine like a beacon of hope.   We might sometimes feel that saints are people we put on a pedestal, to be looked up to and admired. The sort of people – whether official saints or people we admired – who make us say “we could never be like that”. They were blessed, they were a blessing to us, and when we sing the hymn ‘For all the saints” we sing with real feeling the line   “we feebly struggle, they in glory shine..”.   An extraordinary example is of one of the most recent and youngest saints – St Carlo Acutis: an English-born Italian Catholic who died of leukaemia in 2006, at the age of 1...
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The parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector: a cure for polaristion?

Luke 18: 9-14    Susan is not with us today because she is at the World Council of Churches 6 th World conference on Faith and Order, in Egypt. Their theme is “Where now for visible unity?” – reflecting one the 1700 th anniversary of the council of Nicaea (of course) and the purpose of the World Council of Churches “to call one another to visible unity”.   You might well think that we could all do with a little more unity in our polarised world – between churches of course, but between all people who find themselves, or make themselves, divided. This week we have had the Caerphilly by-election for the Senedd – causing division as any election tends to do – and so much of the world news shows us conflict between people and reflects the sort of division which so easily leads to hatred of the other.   In our divided world, how are those who follow Jesus Christ supposed to live?   One simple answer is – following Jesus’ teachings. ...
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We pray.. God listens. (Luke 18: 1-8)

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 Psalm 121 
 Luke 18:1-8 Oh Lord hear my prayer… When I call, answer me O Lord hear my prayer… Come and listen to me.   It is only natural sometimes in our lives to feel that we need answers in our prayers. We call, we wail, we weep, and we wonder if anyone is actually listening.   Perhaps as you were meant to be listening to our Bible readings you were finding it hard to concentrate. Perhaps you’ve been worrying about a member of the family – an elderly relative with health problems, or a younger one in financial difficulty; perhaps you’re worried about your own health, or fearful of the future in some other way.   Perhaps you’ve confided in someone else or maybe you’re the only one who knows what it is that you’re bothered about. With all this potential for distraction going on in our minds and in our lives, how are we meant to quieten our own voices for a moment and listen to the Bible?   I hope some of us found Psalm 121 helpful “I lif...
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Harvest -wonder. (Psalm 8 & Mark 10: 13-16)

  This week I am going "off lectionary" and exploring harvest through Psalm 8 and Mark 10: 13-16     However many harvest festivals we have celebrated in our lives, I hope we never lose a sense of how amazing and beautiful our world is. I love to see and smell all the wonders of harvest-time: the decoration of a chapel at harvest festival, the harvested fields around us, the trees laden with fruit, and the gathering of people to celebrate.   If you need a bit more wonder in your life – I want to share with you a bit of the story of the golden mole, which I heard about on Radio 4 this week, on a short programme called ‘a carnival of animals’.   Golden moles are found in sub-Saharan Africa, so we don’t need to worry about them digging up Pembrokeshire! Their kidneys are so efficient that many species never need to drink water. Their hearing is so sensitive that they can detect the vibrations of insects moving above them, and distinguish between the ones th...
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Enough faith (Proper 22 & harvest)

 Luke 17: 5-10 Do you remember the scene in the film “Oliver”…? Where Oliver Twist, the beautiful blond haired urchin takes his emptied bowl of gruel and asks “Please, sir, can I have some more?”. You will remember the roar of disapproval from Mr Bumble - the portly man in charge -   “MORE?!”.   Poor Oliver asks because he hasn’t enough. By contrast we celebrate having so much…   How lovely it always is to pause and celebrate harvest. Of course, we eat every day – several times a day if we’re lucky. But we don’t always remember to stop and give thanks. So today we make sure we do that.   Being surrounded with so much produce – either here in church or in our gardens and fields and shops – we realise how blessed we are, how grateful to God. And so we celebrate having enough – and then we can be generous with what we have to share with others.    The story we heard today of Jesus and the disciples might make us wonder what it mea...
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Living with 'enough' (proper 21)

 1 Timothy 6: 6-19  (also a harvest service & chapel anniversary!) I don’t know if you caught the story in the news this week that it’s 70 years since the first advert was shown on ITV – it was for …Gibbs toothpaste. And watching it, it was really just trying to persuade us to use that toothpaste and not another sort of toothpaste.   Since that time, advertising has become a multi-billion pound industry, and we all might have our favourite ad – one that has intrigued us (the mysterious, adventurous figure in black delivering Milk Tray?) or made us sing a long (a million housewives every day pick up a can of beans and say…?) or one that has made us laugh (the Smash aliens?).   Adverts are there to make us aware of products, but more than that to make us want them, they make us buy more, eventually they can make us want everything, so that we are deeply dissatisfied with what we have.   In contrast to all that, Paul’s letter to Timothy has some sen...
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