FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY YEAR B 2015 PSALM 111:10

When I was very young there was a place I would never go. In fact, the very thought of going there would cause me to panic – heart racing, hands sweating,pupils dilated, feet restless – all the signs that my small, four year-old body wasgetting ready to fight or run away. And for me, running away has alwaysseemed the smart option. So, there was no way I was ever going to go

anywhere near That Place. That Place - this location of blood-curdling horror,was in my grandmother’s backyard. When my family went to visit, my brotherand I would be kicked out into the garden to play while my parents supped teawith Nanny, as we called my mother’s mother. It was there in that otherwise perfectly serene backyard in the London suburbs that my brother......

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THIRD SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY YEAR B 2015 MARK 1:14-20

It is the most popular participation sport in the United States, and also in the United Kingdom. Actually, strictly speaking, it is the second, but in my rulebook

the most popular participation sport, walking, is disqualified. How does taking a leisurely stroll to your car count as taking part in a sport? Come to think of it,

I’ve never been too convinced that the second placed pastime should be called a sport either. When I was a kid I used to argue with my friend Ian about exactly this. It was Ian’s main hobby. He used to go every Saturday with his dad, sit on a riverbank and cast a nylon line into the water. And then he’d wait. For hours. Then he’d go home again. So I used to annoy him by saying, “Come on Ian, that’s not a sport.” To which he would proudly tell me that angling was indeed a sport, and the most popular one in Britain. But it never really caught my imagination, even though Ian would horrify me with stories about how he put a maggot in his mate’s sandwich, and his mate never found out; and how heonce had a hook in his thumb and couldn’t extract it. Despite his best efforts Ian failed to impress me with these stories of angling heroism. Maybe if he had battled all day with a hammerhead shark, knowing that this encounter would

end in the certain death of one the combatants, then I’d have been impressed. If he had spun me a yarn about a white whale and an obsessed sea-captain, I may have given have given his hobby the time that he was convinced it deserved. But this was England and Ian fished in meandering, sleepy rivers where the only exciting thing that ever happened was a lazy cow dawdling down to the river for a drink. Can you really sit in a boat drinking beer and call it a sport? Well, I guess they put synchronized swimming into the Olympics.

I went fishing once. Sea fishing. When I was....

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SECOND SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY YEAR B 2015 JOHN 1:43-51

You know those moments when you’re talking to someone and they say something so outrageous that you can’t quite believe your ears? In fact you wonder for a moment if you aren’t actually asleep, because what you just heard can only be said in a fantasy world or in dreamland. You must have slipped into some parallel universe, where everything looks the same but there is something deeply twisted about the laws of physics in this universe that make possible things which in our normal universe just could not happen. Well, this happened to me nearly twenty years ago, and even though many thousands of days have passed since then it remains firmly in my memory. That is how deep the scars go from this conversation. About a year earlier I had begun my first job as a parish priest. I was the rector of two small villages in the heart of the English countryside. Think ‘Vicar of Dibley’, but more eccentric. The parishes were right next to each other, but were completely independent and had nothing in common except a geographical boundary and me. They had their own lay leadership, their own councils, their own worship services, and their own finances. So on Sundays I would take a service at 9.30 in one village, and then drive a mile to the other church and take an identical service. Now the experts in church leadership say new pastors should not suggest any changes during the first year in their new congregations. And so for my first twelve months I wondered to myself why these two villages never did anything together. Each had their own events, customs and traditions, all without any consideration of the other. And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be good if we started to do some things together, you know have some joint social events or shared worship services. 

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BAPTISM OF CHRIST YEAR B 2015 MARK 1:4-11 

During my trip to London after Christmas I came across a couple of examples of what makes the British stand out from the rest of the world. The custom of not talking to someone you don’t know unless you have been introduced. The first example came at King’s Cross train station where I overheard a young boy ask his mother, “Mummy, why was no one talking on the train?” His mother answered, “Because it’s against the law.” “What happens if you do it?”, the lad followed up. “They arrest you.” “What happens then?” “They send you to prison.” “How long for?” “27 years.” The other example I came across in the newspaper The Independent. Apparently, there is about to be launched on the British people, a bold new solution to the problem of, how can I put this delicately, dog waste on sidewalks and in parks. A new company called ‘PooPrints’ offers a service that cross-references samples of doggy waste matter with a canine DNA database. The company will then send threatening letters to the dog owner. Which just goes to show that the British would rather send dog muck to each other in the mail than say, ”Hey buddy, clean up after your dog”, like an American would.

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SECOND SUNDAY OF CHRISTMAS YEAR B 2014 LUKE 

2:41-52 

One afternoon when I was nine I took the bus into town with my eleven year-old brother, Keith. We lived about four miles from the city center, and Keith and I often used to hang out there, looking in the shops and staying out of mischief. Keith was mature and responsible, at least he was in my eyes. But somewhere during that afternoon we became separated and I was lost. I wandered around the city center retracing our steps hoping to find him.

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CHRISTMAS EVE 2014 ISAIAH 9:2-7 

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FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT YEAR B 2014 LUKE 1:39-45

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THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT 2014 ISAIAH 61:1-4, 8-11

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SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT 2014 ISAIAH 40:1-11 

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