Andrew's Sermons

Let the words of my mouth and meditations of my heart, be acceptable in your sight, my lord, God, and redeemer. The parable of the talents is one which I’ve always struggled with. We often hear sermons which interpret this to be about good money management and tithing to the church, or about our own individual talents and skills, or perhaps on the abundance of God’s love. And while there is merit in these, it is a story and when Jesus tells it, he offers no interpretation at all. The concern I have is for the fate of third slave, being cast into the darkness. So when we identify the slave owner as God in this parable, are we risking a toxic representation of the Divine? Now this is a strong statement to make but one of commentaries I read, recorded a conversation between the writer and her son. She stated her misgivings to which he said, “It sums up everything Christianity is about.  I love it!”  Baffled, she asked him what he "loved."  “Oh, isn’t it obvious?  I lov...

  Loving God, I pray that through the lives of our dearly departed, all the saints in heaven, the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, these words may be to your praise and glory. Amen. Traditionally, this time of year has always been a time of remembering and praying for the dead. In Celtic times, November the 1 st was New Years Day, it marked the end of harvest and autumn and the start of winter, when life expectancy was much reduced. The church adopted it to be All Saints Day, which they called all All Hallows Day, making October 31 st , All Hallows Eve, which we know as Halloween. While it is now very commercialised, this is a day we set aside to remember our loved ones. So, this is All Souls, and next week we have Remembrance Sunday. Combined with shorter daylight hours, the cold and the wet, and all the uncertainty around covid, these are very difficult times for many of us. And then, losing loved ones has made the year even more difficult, and in...

Sermon for Bible Sunday – October 25 th , 2020 Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Or And the spechis of my mouth schulen be, that tho plese; and the thenkynge of myn herte euere in thi siyt. Lord, myn helpere; and myn ayenbiere. Those words are all from Psalm 19, verse 14, which I sometimes use as an opening prayer when preaching. The second version is from the Wycliffe Bible, the first ever English Bible, written in 1384. Wycliffe translated his work from the Latin Vulgate Bible, written in the fourth century and accepted by the catholic church as the official version of the Latin Bible until 1979. Our local Bible hero, William Tyndale, believed to have been born in Melksham Court in Stinchcombe, translated the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek, not Latin, but didn’t actually translate the psalms. And today, there are 450 versions of the Bible in English alone, and all major languages have...

Creator God, I pray that my words may be to your honour and Glory. Amen. I’ve always been an avid reader of science fiction books, and recently, have been reading the Fifth Season. The story is set on a planet, like earth, which could be a far-future earth, with just one super-continent, called the stillness. Which is anything but still, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunami are frequent. They have four seasons, as we do, but occasionally, there is a fifth season, it can be caused by a volcano filling the air with ash and dust, by poisoned air causing crops to fail, by sea levels rising and so on. The fifth season can last months, years or centuries. People plan to survive a season, but know that one day, they may not survive, and perhaps their race will end. A quote from the book is, “Winter will come early, and hard, and it will last a long, long time. It will end, of course, like every winter does, and then the world will return to its old self. Eventually. Eventually....

Heavenly Father, I pray that through the Holy Spirit and the love of Jesus Christ our Lord, these words may be to your Glory. Amen. The year after we got married, Louise and I decided to go on foreign holiday. It was a very long journey and it was through a wilderness, we stopped at B&B’s on the way, we crossed the border into Scotland, our journey taking us to Inverness, and we thought, it can’t be far now. Three hours later, direct north, after the crossing the Sutherland wilderness, we arrived in our remote holiday cottage, on the north coast of Scotland, halfway between Cape Wrath in the west and John O’Groats in the east. Now that seemed like a big journey, partly because we realised that once we had arrived, we would have to get home again, it was a beautiful place, a true wilderness and required planning and a good road atlas, there were no sat-navs or google maps in those days, oh no. I’m not comparing our journey to the Israelites spending forty years in the wilder...