Poems, Sermons and Writings

Isaiah 32:14-18   The 2025 Symbol for Creationtide is inspired by  Isaiah 32:14-18. Titled ”Garden of Peace,” it  depicts a white dove flying over a tree. The left side of the tree is barren, with roots digging into dry soil, surrounded by an arid, desolate landscape. In contrast, the right side of the tree is lush and green, standing amidst a flourishing landscape. The dove, carrying an olive branch in its beak, flies toward the right—symbolising peace as a transition from a war-torn, overexploited land to one that is fertile, thriving, and hospitable. If we think of a theology of creation many of us might look back to the story of creation from Genesis and remember when God said “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” That’s it - humans are to ru...

Micah 4:1-5 1 Tim 2:1-6 Matt 5:43-48 Nigh on a decade ago I was over in San Francisco and I attended Grace Cathedral for Sunday worship. In the basement of that Cathedral was a shop. It was there I purchased something I am wearing today. It is a small pendant and it is made from the metal of decommissioned nuclear missiles. This for me embodied that phrase “you shall beat your swords into ploughshares” for us in the 21st century.   We read today from the prophet Micah. The exact same passage is found in the prophet Isaiah’s book. Later in Isaiah we read the famous passage sometimes called the Peaceable Kingdom. It is linked with Israel’s hopes and dreams for a messiah and then goes on “The wolf shall live with the lamb;     the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together,     and a little child shall lead them.” It pictures an ideal world where there is no harm to any creature. One of the titles of the h...

I saw a suggestion online for some different clerical wear for this Sunday. However if I had turned up wearing a dark robe with a black helmet and black mask and breathing stertorously, some of you might have got the Star wars reference and perhaps one or two might have linked it to “May the 4th.” A play on that star wars blessing “May the force be with you”. It would have suggested who I followed and something about my discipleship. However, being a disciple of Christ and a priest in His church, I elected instead to wear my alb, my white baptismal robe and the stole, the yoke of service; the chasuble symbolising charity, the yoke of Christ, and the seamless garment Christ wore, reflecting the unity of the Church and Christ's sacrifice.  How does your discipleship of the risen Christ express itself? How does our discipleship as a church affect how we behave and the choices we make? What is discipleship? We can find some of the answers to this in both the Acts and the Gospel story t...

A dispersive prism is an angled piece of transparent material such as glass. If you shine white light into an angled prism it exits the prism broken up into the spectral colours, the colours of the rainbow. The fact that it comes out as red, orange yellow green blue indigo and violet on one side does not negate the truth of its existence as white light on the other side.The resurrection is true but what we see in scripture is shone through the experiences of various witnesses and refracted by the writers of scripture into a variety of colours. And as it is with light, there are colours which our eyes cannot see or appreciate such as ultraviolet or infrared. There is more to the story than we can read in scripture. So we have different accounts of the resurrection which reflect the different witnesses and how they experienced it and the different writers with their varying emphases. All these different colours of the resurrection contribute to the glorious white light of its truth. ...