word | spirit | world | church
This is a time full of feasting. Everywhere you go it seems you’re offered a plate of mince pies or piece of stollen, perhaps with a glass of mulled wine. You can’t escape it—biscuits and coffee at church become wine and cake week after week. Or at least that’s normal in the UK, I’m told… Continue reading Feasting at Christmastime
Advent starts on Sunday, which will confuse some of you because you’re expecting it to start on Monday. Others of you will be appalled at the idea of ‘doing Christmas’ in November, even if it’s just one day, so it’s good news that ‘doing Christmas’ and celebrating Advent are quite different things. Advent is dark.… Continue reading Advent is Coming
We have to thank a man of the north east, the Venerable Bede, for the fact that we all call the year I’m writing this 2025. Bede didn’t invent AD as a counting system (that was Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century), but the eighth century he popularised it as a way of counting dates.… Continue reading Time Belongs to Jesus
This is a time full of feasting. Everywhere you go it seems you’re offered a plate of mince pies or piece of stollen, perhaps with a glass of mulled wine. You can’t escape it—biscuits and coffee at church become wine and cake week after week. Or at least that’s normal in the UK, I’m told… Continue reading Christmas is for the Church
We live in an attention economy. Increasingly this is causing an attention crisis. We are divided against ourselves by the many claims on our eyes and ears. A house divided cannot stand. Modern life is frenetic. Everything is lived at breakneck pace, and sometimes we do trip and break our proverbial necks. That’s one of… Continue reading We need Advent
All of us pattern our lives after something. All our church’s do too. For many that’s the agrarian calendar or the academic one. For your church it should be something of God’s life in the world. I’ve argued before that there is great wisdom to be found in the church calendar. Most churches follow a… Continue reading Church Calendar and Preaching
Advent starts on Sunday, though I suspect many of us will be opening calendars to starting devotionals on Friday. Advent is dark. Advent is bleak. Advent is about staring at the wretched core of the ash we clutch onto so that when our eyes are lifted and the thrice holy God comes with the dawn… Continue reading Advent is Coming
Our world is made of atoms, of spinning particles of energy careering around one another in a fabulously chaotic and surprisingly ordered way. Or so the story goes. I don’t mean to suggest that I doubt the scientists whose work informs our understanding of physics and matter; I have no reason to do so. What… Continue reading Repost: We Are Made of Stories
If you’ve heard a sermon on the incarnation in a conservative evangelical circle I suspect there’s a high chance the preacher quoted C.S Lewis to refer to the Son of God condescending to take on flesh as “the Grand Miracle.” He is our patron saint, after all—despite not being one of us—so the reference is… Continue reading The Grand Miracle
It’s approaching Christmas time. We’re beginning, perhaps, to hear Christmas sermons, depending on how your tradition structures these things. In the Evangelical world someone somewhere is advising us to remember to include the cross in our preaching—don’t give them the cute and sentimentalised baby Jesus, remind them that the meaning of Christmas is found at… Continue reading God in the Manger
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