Simon Says ...

--> Exodus 17.8-12 ; Luke 11.1-13 It is a great pleasure to be with you this morning.   I’m very grateful to Matt for the invitation to be here, and I bring you greetings from your Cathedral Church where we pray for you regularly. We pray for you, and I’ve been invited to talk this morning on the theme of prayer.   At the Cathedral, I’ve been involved in running a “School of Prayer”. In part, that is for those who are Christians but could use some focussed input on prayer.   It is also aimed at those who are not Christians, but who want to learn to pray.   Learning to pray, of course, brings people close to God.   The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that communities of prayer are one of his key priorities, and launched a communitybased at Lambeth Palace this week.   So it is really great that you are marking National Prayer Weekend .   This is important stuff you are doing. But let me make a confession.   I find prayer r...

A Sermon for Evensong   Proverbs 8.1,22-31 ; Revelation 4 Some words from our second Lesson this evening: “Day and night without ceasing they sing”. In the parish church I served before coming here, we hosted a day for the Royal School of Church Music.   It was a great deal of fun, and a good lot of singing went on.   At the end of the day, perusing the visitors book, I found that one of the children attending the day had written “this is a beautiful church and a very good place to sin”.   Perhaps this is a good point to say to our visiting choir that we’ve enjoyed having you very much and we hope that you have found this to be a good place to sin g !   If you’ve found it to be a good place for anything else, then so much the better.             Singing is a very important part of Christian life.   There are very few places in our society that we come together...

Isaiah 33.13-22 ; John 3.22-36 Some words from our second Lesson this evening: “He must increase, but I must decrease”.  John the Baptist, the best man at Jesus’ wedding, is warned by his disciples that Jesus is stealing his thunder.  Jesus too is preaching and baptizing, and more people are going to them.  Just as the aides to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are looking frantically at opinion polls and worrying about who is most popular, so John’s disciples are worried that Jesus is more popular than their man.  John, however, is not worried.  That is how things must be.  The bridegroom has arrived, the best man must step aside.  “He must increase, but I must decrease”. John’s saying has become an important one for the Christian life.   “He must increase, but I must decrease”, has become a pattern for how Christians should live.   In our lives also, Jesus must increase and we must decrease.   Dimi...

I collect versions of Leonard Cohen 's song ' Halleluia '. Cohen's own version is superb, and there is a fantastic cover of it by Jeff Buckley on his album 'Grace'. I also find Bono's cover of it has really grasped the song. Needless to say the X-Factor cover of it last Christmas was a self-promoting travesty. And, sadly, the version that is on the soundtrack of Shrek is too relentlessly upbeat, and so fails to do it justice. But tonight I discovered a choral arrangement of the song, first used at St Paul's Cathedral, which is truly excellent. I confess to being a bit nervous when I saw it on the programme, but it really was good. A new version for the collection, and a bit of help with tomorrow's sermon!

A Reflection for Compline using Psalm 13 . David Runcorn tells the story of being in Church and hearing someone pray to God about a famine in India . It wasn’t the normal sort of intercessions that the congregation was used to: ‘God why on earth do you let this happen? Why don’t you do something about it? How can you let all of those people suffer in that way?’ Runcorn comments that the man praying was new to Christian faith and new to the church and so hadn’t learnt what constitutes good manners in praying. He goes on to hope that he never does. What is refreshing about this story is the honesty and the directness that the pray-er has in addressing God. ‘Do something about it, how can you let such a dreadful thing happen?’ The man praying doesn’t have a neat theology of how bad things can happen. He has a healthy and human response to the awfulness of the situation he is praying about. But imagine for a moment that prayers like this were said at...

A reflection for compline using Psalm 77 . Some words from the Psalm we have just said together: ‘You are the God who worked wonders • and declared your power among the peoples’. As we consider the Psalms this Lent, it is worth remembering that the Psalms are the ‘Prayerbook of the Bible’ (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). They are a collection of hymns and prayers that were in regular use in Israel , in the Temple , in Synagogues and in homes, in public worship and in private prayer. The Psalms formed the basis of Jesus’ own prayers, and they, along with the book of Isaiah, are the most quoted book of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament. The church has used the Psalms since the earliest days. St Paul urges his readers to praise God in Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. The offices of morning and evening prayer and also of compline consist of saying or singing the Psalms and reading the Bible. Many of the responses that we use in these services are taken from the Psal...