Humane Catholic

A sermon preached at Evensong at SMV, Sunday 6 September 2008 Paul, arriving in Ephesus, finds some disciples who have never heard of the Holy Spirit. He tells them about it, and they are re-baptised into the true faith. And so begins a great tradition – of one group of Christians telling another group of Christians that they are missing some crucial element of faith, and then converting them to their brand of the truth. Of course in this particular case the missing element of faith – the Holy Spirit – is pretty crucial, and I don’t blame Paul at all for wanting to share his news, and for bringing them into a new form of faith. But it does raise for me some fairly fundamental questions about how we, as Christians, behave towards other Christians whose beliefs are not the same as ours. Is it our job to convert them to our set of beliefs, or should we passively stand by, and leave them to remain with the set of beliefs they currently have, even if we think they are wrong? There are, to m...

A sermon preached at SMV, Trinity 7, 2008. The Sunday before GAFCON. Yesterday, if one can believe what one reads in the papers, the Anglican Communion split. The curtain-raiser for the Global Anglican Future conference, the conservative alternative to Lambeth, announced, in effect, that there was no future – at least no future in which conservatives and liberals could co-exist. As someone who doesn’t much like being called a liberal, but who is certainly not a conservative, I wonder what place there will be for me – for most of us perhaps – in this brave new world of two Anglican churches. It is actually far too soon to say whether the GAFCON leaders are right, or whether Archbishop Williams will be able to stitch back together the broken seam. And so in this sermon I don’t want to try to address directly the issue of a split, or even the presenting issues driving that split. I do, however, want to address what I believe to be one of the background causes. One of the accusations I mos...

A sermon at Evensong at SMV, Feast of St Barnabas (24 August) 2008 When I was a student in theological college over a decade ago, there was a regular question raised in the Friday “community time” as to the contemporary spiritual value of the daily offices of morning and evening prayer. Some – including myself – said we found it not merely helpful, but an essential part of keeping sane in the wake of the quite manic program of study and work we were required to undertake. Some others, however, said they found its rigid formality stifling of prayer, and argued for much less highly structured forms of daily worship and reflection. Perhaps the most helpful intervention in the debate came from someone, I can’t remember who, who suggested that the issue here was no so much the substance but the form. What some were finding helpful and others difficult was the form of the service, and its rigidity. No-one, however, was seriously questioning the substantive idea that as priests in training we...