On love and justice: a sermon for the third Sunday of Advent

The Christ who comes at Christmas, who has always been at its heart and whose return we await, is the one who will transform the wilderness: even the wildernesses in which we find ourselves and our world today. He is the one who heals the blind and the lame. The one who eschews soft robes and royal palaces, in solidarity with the migrant who travels in the hope of safe welcome. The one whose judgement is good and offers salvation, not just for himself or a special few, but for all who welcome him and follow him.

Blessed are those who take no offence at him.

faith, sermonsHannah SwithinbankDecember 14, 2025sermons, faith, politicsComment

People of God, awake! A sermon for Advent Sunday

People of God, awake!

This is the call of the prayer we prayed at the lighting of the first advent candle.
It is the call of Paul to the Romans, and of Jesus to his disciples in Matthew.

Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme – Wake up, the voice is calling us — runs the famous German carol.

Wake up, the saviour is coming.

There is something fundamentally strange about Advent,

faith, sermonsHannah SwithinbankDecember 3, 2025faith, sermons, adventComment

“My shards are showing.” A homily for All Souls

One of my favourite poets is Ada Limón, the most recent US Poet Laureate. And her poem, The Hurting Kind, is a remembering of her grandparents; full of fragmentary images of their lives and of the death of her grandfather.

“My shards are showing,” she writes of her grief, “But I do not know what I mean, so I fix my face in the rearview, a face with thousands of headstones behind it.”

Hannah SwithinbankNovember 2, 2025Comment

“I believe in Angels”—a homily for the first evensong of the Feast of Michael and All Angels

’d like to begin with a quotation from a text that some of you might know.

I have a dream, a song to sing
To help me cope with anything
If you see the wonder of a fairy tale
You can take the future, even if you fail

I believe in angels

faithHannah SwithinbankSeptember 28, 2025faith, sermons, michaelmas, angels, musicComment

sorry, sorry... (a sermon on repentance)

Oops, sorry!
Sorr-ee.
Uh, Sorry?

Sorry is one of the most flexible words in British English.

faithHannah SwithinbankSeptember 14, 2025sermons, faith, christianityComment

a sermon on prayer

Our ability to live this prayer grows as we pray it, as we come into the presence of God and say the words…

This is not so much a begging God to change his mind, but a deepening understanding of God’s heart and mind, a begging God to change us that we may be a part of the realisation of the coming kingdom. In Williams’ words: “If prayer works it is because of lives that have been crucified with Christ.”

I don’t know about you, but I find that a terrifying prospect.

faithHannah SwithinbankJuly 27, 2025sermons, faith, christianityComment

On grasping equality with God (an address for choral evensong)

“Who, though he existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped”

What would it have meant to hear these words—the words of this whole hymn—in Philippi in the mid-first century? By this time, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus was dead—but he continued to loom large in the life of the empire, as the deified Augustus.

What would it have meant to hear these words? To affirm them and to let them shape your life?

history, faithHannah SwithinbankJune 8, 2025sermonsComment

A Sermon for the first Sunday in Lent

Since the fall, the world has become a wilderness for humanity—but it was not intended to be so. The wilderness was made to be a garden, and the ground of our being is not just the ground, the dusty earth that has become wilderness, but the ground that was made by God. Humanity was made of dust that God breathed life into, to live in the garden—not the in wilderness.

And God does not intend to leave us in the wilderness.

Hannah SwithinbankMarch 9, 2025Comment

Walking the paths of Lent (a sermon for Ash Wednesday)

I wonder how many of you have walked across cliffs and moors covered with purple heather and, in paying attention to where you’re putting your feet, noticed the way that the paths seem to change over time? As people walk, furrows develop first through the plants and then through the soil in which they are rooted. Over time these furrows grow both deeper and wider as people start walking two abreast, or pass each other, or bypass puddles and muddy patches. Yet although the path grows and changes, fundamentally it remains the same—a way along which people go as they walk the same journey.

faithHannah SwithinbankMarch 5, 2025faith, sermonsComment