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.

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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?

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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.

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