Mary’s prophecy echoes through women’s music of the ages. From the mystical compositions of the 12th Century polymath Hildegard of Bingen to the rallying songs of the Suffragettes; from Billie Holiday pausing for prayer before closing her shows with Strange Fruit to the women of Greenham Common and those at #MeToo vigils uniting across the years in renditions of We Shall Overcome, this song of a girl in Nazareth continues to convey the power for everyday women to envision a different, better world, and in the very act of envisioning it, to begin to bring it about. The lives and testimonies of working-class women have been largely obscured in history mostly by being ignored or condescended to, or in Mary’s case, by being elevated to the other-worldly, the Queen of Heaven, not a normal human. But Mary’s prophecy sings out in defiance of all that.

The talk concludes with a recording Canticle of the Turning, a ‘vigorous paraphrase of the Magnificat which presents Mary as a country girl who is more than a meek maiden’ a paraphrase of Luke 1 by Rory Cooney, tune: Star of the County Down, Irish traditional, performed by Rory Cooney, Gary Daigle & Theresa Donohoo from ‘Safety Harbor’, 1990.

A talk for The Fourth Sunday of Advent, 19 December 2021.

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Churches are good at hosting 'Jacob’s Joins'; elsewhere called ‘Potluck Suppers’ or ‘Faith Suppers’ or ‘Bring-and-Shares’. The thing about a 'Jacob’s Join' is that we all bring something to the table. It's a metaphor for the church. Today, an invitation to celebrate what the John the Baptists bring: the those who are given less to comfortableness and are more driven - the activists, the agitators, those give to righting wrongs.

A talk for The Third Sunday of Advent, 12 December 2021.

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It's not the high and mighty ones like the emperor or the high priests who 'receive the word of the Lord' in scripture. It's always the outsiders, those whose ‘otherness’ ‘questions our treating our perspective as if it were God’s’. Like the poet whose words spark fresh ways of seeing life, like the musician whose sounds provoke new sensations in us, like the lover who makes demands on us we never knew we could meet, the outsider may reveal to us ‘that we do not live in the world we think we live in’ (Rowan Williams) Is the future of the spirit to be found among those experimenting and creating 'outside the world we think we live in'? There are plenty of inspiring examples.

A talk for The Second Sunday of Advent, 5 December 2021.

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In a world of broken promises, the sure promise of Jesus is that though the signs of the times seem dark, and we may feel the weight of the burden of them, nevertheless he is coming into the world, today, and that means that our ‘redemption is drawing near’, right now.

A talk for The First Sunday of Advent, 28 November 2021.

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Jesus never positioned himself as a king, in fact he went out of his way to avoid being seen as one. Look at the way he wriggles through Pilate’s interrogation on this subject. Although the focus of his teaching was the Kingdom of God, he was clear that meant something entirely different from the kingdoms of this world....

A talk for Christ The King, Sunday 21 November 2021.

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Are the agonies we are living through mark the beginning of the end for us; or can we rather see them as the end of the beginning? Are the troubles of today the birth pangs of a better world which we can shape if we engage with the struggle through them, if we act hopefully, create imaginatively, and commit to the earth and each other - all peoples together - in the spirit of those whose fight for a better world we honour today?

A talk for the Remembrance Sunday 14 November 2021.

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God was troubled that the people of the great city of Nineveh ‘did not know their right hand from their left’. That they were a people - in other words - losing their way, troubled in their ease, psychically impoverished in their wealth. In our climate confusion and shame over the many inequalities and inequities of our situation, are we all Ninevites now? 

If so then the Nineveh story offers a strange kind of hope to us in this week where the world’s leaders meet to discuss action on climate change and we, the people, wait in hope and fear to discern the shape our future might take. For the Nineveh story offers us a glimpse of some unlikely heroes - for it was the actions of the people which effected change in Nineveh; an unexpected and very welcome twist offering hope.

For, as Greta Thunberg recently said, ‘Hope is not passive; hope is not ‘blah-blah-blah’. Hope is telling the truth; hope is taking action; and hope always comes from the people.’

A talk for the Third Sunday before Advent, 7 November 2021, during the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow.

Find the text to this and all my talks at bit.ly/johndavies-talks.

The scenario in which  many people in the crowd had a bite to eat hidden away in the folds of their clothes or their carry bags, but didn’t cough up until after they saw the little boy made his offering and they were moved to follow suit, sharing their provisions with the people standing nearby. I like that because it’s a version of the miracle which replaces a holy conjuring trick with human agency. And I believe that God works best when we humans act out to recreate his generous ways. For the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand teaches how God will provide enough food for everyone to eat: and it teaches us that everyone will eat when everyone takes just what they need and shares the rest with others... This is not religious magical thinking: it’s an achievable scenario which the World Food Programme has broken down into five steps which world leaders can take...

A talk for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 17 October 2021.

Find the text to this and all my talks at bit.ly/johndavies-talks.

Harvest-time permits us to be wowed by the atoms, to seek oneness with the birds, to take time to look attentively at the least of the flowers in the fields. The way of Harvest can be the way of every day. Living in this way we may find our truer place in nature...

A talk for the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, 10 October 2021.

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Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Peter Thiel, Bezos are convinced that 'death is a problem that can be solved' and are investing millions into experimental age-reversing technology. Meanwhile the rest of us seek immortality by slapping on Wrinkle Repair Regenerating Cream, overworking to leave our peers and children with something memorable to put on our gravestone. We have traditionally mastered relationships through enforcing patriarchy; we have tried mastering the earth through industrialisation and technology, achieving lives of ease and luxury in the wealthier parts of the world but at the expense of a scorched dead earth, overheating seas and increasing numbers of climate refugees.

It's not that we shouldn't try to master our lives; it's just that we need to find the right way to go about it. A closer reading of Genesis' creation passages, and Jesus' teaching on relationships, suggests that the mystery of mastery is that it is achieved through humility.

A talk for the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, 3 October 2021.

Find the text to this and all my talks at bit.ly/johndavies-talks.