Monthly Archives

November 2019

Aceding to Acedia

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Sermon delivered at New College, Christ the King, 24 November 2019

If you’ve watched any adverts recently, you’ll have noticed that the advertising team at BT are suffering from flashbacks to their A-levels. In their ad, a schoolgirl walks across town, intoning Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

In a bizarre twist, its backing track is Stormzy’s Blinded by your Grace, in a Dickens/God mash-up that feels entirely appropriate for a New College sermon, because the liturgy for today’s festival of Christ the King is all about these contrasts. On the one hand, the reading from Jeremiah is about God sending a King to gather the lost sheep of Israel, and the Psalm and the anthem are about God defending his chosen people; while on the other hand the Gospel reading is about God failing to show up to rescue Jesus at the crucifixion, as the thieves on either side also die painfully on their crosses. Read More

Thought For The Day – Bonfire Night – 5th Nov 2019

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Remember, remember the fifth of November…

Guy Fawkes was by no means the only conspirator in the gunpowder plot, but he’s succeeded in being the man we most associate with it. His claim to the day was immortalised by the mask used in the graphic novel and film, ‘V for Vendetta’, where the character V is masked as Guy Fawkes throughout. Since then, demonstrators against parliaments and powers the world over have worn the Guy Fawkes mask, because it says at the end of the film: ‘V was you…and me. He was all of us.’ Read More