Simon Says ...

A sermon for the Chrism Eucharist,  Diocese of Derby, Maundy Thursday 2013. 1 Samuel 17.31-33, 37-40 ; John 19.1-5 It had been a hard Lent.  The APCM, the annual church meeting, had not been able to ask a question about the flag we flew in the churchyard without it feeling to me like it had been asked using a baseball bat.  Then, on Low Sunday, I was speaking with a friend of a friend, a retired priest who knew something of what had happened.  “You need to cultivate the skin of a rhinoceros”, he told me.  I think it was possibly the worst piece of advice I was ever given as a parish priest. Our first reading this morning tells us of David being unable to function in the armour of King Saul.   ‘I cannot walk with these’, David complains, ‘for I am not used to them’.   Saul’s armour was good armour.   It protected the king, it identified him as king and conveyed his importance.   Saul’s armour was of no use to Da...

Have you ever played or seen Sim City?   It is a computer game in which you are invited to build your own city by deploying some basic features of city life.   It is undergoing a re-launch this year, not without some pain.   For all it is a game about planning and building, the makers did not plan for the popularity and complexity of their own game and did not build enough servers to cope with the online demand.   Sim City asks a range of questions about what makes a good city and what is needed to build a good city.   Playing Sim City brings one into contact with the need for disposing of rubbish, laying pipes and cables, building schools, policing, even offering leisure activities, and, in some versions of the game, capping volcanoes!   And, at least since 2003, places of worship have been included in the range of options a Sim City builder could include.   Some of the ingredients (though sadly not the capping of volcanoes) have been tackled in ...

On the 24 th March, which this year is Palm Sunday, the Church of England’s calendar of instructs us to remember a martyr.  Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, perhaps, except that this martyr was the Archbishop of San Salvador who was martyred only in 1980.  Oscar Romero is commemorated in the Church of England’s calendar, and stands together with other twentieth century Christian martyrs, on the west front of Westminster Abbey. In El Salvador, Romero is known as San Romero (Saint Romero).  But Romero is not formally commemorated by his own Roman Catholic Church. Oscar Arnulfo Romero was born on 15 th August 1917 in Ciudad Barrios, a mountain town in eastern El Salvador accessible only on foot or by animal. The second of seven children, his family grew some crops and his father worked at the local telegraph office.  After the maximum three years at state school, he had a tutor and was also apprenticed to learn carpentry.  As a ch...