Mount Calvary Sermons

EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 2015 EPHESIANS 2:11-22 Everyone over the age of sixty remembers where they were when they heard the news. I know where I was. I was two months old and I was in the arms of my mother. She was listening to the BBC. She did what many young mothers around the world did that moment when they heard. She prayed, shed some tears, and wondered what kind of world she had delivered her baby into. This was a volatile and even paranoid period of history already, but now there was this added anxiety. America’s president had been assassinated and who could tell what in the world would happen now. Would there even be a world as we know it by the time the tragedy had played out? There was already a dividing wall of hostility across the globe, and now here was another layer of hurt.   Read the full Sermon here: http://s3.amazonaws.com/dfc_attachments/public/documents/3209804/20150719_Tear_down_that_wall.pdf 

SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 2015 MARK 6:14-29 There are t wo t ypes of people in t he world – those of us who are happy to live with uncertainty and those of us who like to have everything nailed down; those who are comfortable with ambiguity and mystery, and those who prefer things to be precise and accurate. Now, I know which kind I am, and it ’s not the one I’d like to be. I’d like t o be t he first kind – from where I sit it looks like that person must have a pretty stress-free life. He doesn’t need all t he answers, she doesn’t need t o have rules in place, they don’t need clear instruct ions – they just live a life of freedom and spont eneity. But , I’m not that person. I’m the other one. So imagine my angst , my inner turmoil, if you please, when last week I found myself st anding at the supermarket checkout labelled “ about 15 it ems”. About 15 items? What does t hat even mean? Read the full Sermon here: http://s3.amazona

FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 2015 MARK 5:21-43 This week I’ve been thinking about superstitions. It’s something you more or less have to think about when you watch baseball. You are confronted with it with every at-bat, it seems. Batters kissing jewelry, pitchers pointing to the sky, fielders deliberately wearing odd socks. I’ve even heard that there once a Major League player who always carried a cheese sandwich in his hip pocket. Like, what did he think was going to happen if he ran onto the field without his sandwich? Would the stadium collapse? The other reason I’ve been thinking about this subject is that someone lent me a talisman. One that you secure to the top of your dashboard, via its Velcro bottom. I’ve brought it to show you, even though most of you won’t be able to see him. It’s a Pope bobblehead. And the likeness is uncanny. He’s got his arms out in papal benediction, and as you drive he will wiggle his head for you. I find it.....   Read the

FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 2015 MARK 4:35-41 If only you could buy faith from a shop and carry it with you, and then when you needed it take it out and brandish it or swallow it, or whatever it is you’d do with it if you could buy faith from a shop. Wouldn’t it be good on those rare moments when we actually get it right in the Christian life, if we could bottle those moments; maybe put them in an aerosol, and then when we needed to we could just take it out and spray ourselves. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, now you can. Liquid Trust. Developed by a New York lab, and sold on Amazon for..... Read the full Sermon here: http://s3.amazonaws.com/dfc_attachments/public/documents/3208677/20150621_Don_t_you_care_if_we_drown.pdf

MARK 4:26-34 Last month I lost five giants. Not the kind that say “Fee, fie, foe, fum”, although that kind does smell the blood of Englishmen, and so it’s always a relief to rid the world of one of those. No these were gentle giants. They don’t galumph through the countryside, swinging clubs and climbing beanstalks. Truth be told they are not the hugest of giants. They were not the gigantic giants that live in California that almost touch the sky. These were smaller giants, but still way taller than me. Two years ago my son Rob and I met the giantest giant of all. He is called General Sherman, and he is in Sequoia National Park. He towered over us. 275 feet over us, to be precise. He is the largest tree (by volume) in the world, and the largest living thing on the dry land of God’s good earth. My giants were only 25 feet tall and they were only thirty years old. That’s what their rings told me, because giants have rings that talk. But giants don’t talk as loudly as th

SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 2015 MARK 3:20-35 Now, you know those nauseating religious types don’t you? Those people who have had amazing conversion experiences and are so full of excitement and joy that they have to tell everyone? No matter what you’re talking about, they are always trying to turn the conversation around to God? You know how nervous they make you feel? You know how when you see them coming down the street you duck into a shop doorway, or pretend you haven’t noticed them? Well, I’m here to tell you today that I used to be one of those Christians. It’s not that I was wrong, it’s not that I regret my zeal. After all, my motives were good. I loved God and I loved the people I was harassing, at least I thought I did. But I was convinced that showing them my love meant being disrespectful of their time, privacy and their own convictions – convictions that I never even bothered to listen to. It’s just that I thought it was better to be rude and impo

Over the years people have applied for some very strange patents. Some of those ideas eventually see the light of day and make our lives easier; and some the inventors have quietly forgotten about, and others they wish they had. One of the strangest is owned by an amateur  inventor named David Kendrick. For some reason that I can’t work out, in 1991 Kendrick applied for a patent for a watch that would count down the minutes until your death. He designed this reverse watch to crunch lots of actuarial data, like your health, family illnesses, diet, lifestyle, and so on, and then calculate your life expectancy. It would then count down to the day you are supposed to die, according to that actuarial data, and display the somber truth of how long you have left. Kendrick believed his invention would serve a useful benefit to people because it would spur the wearer on to acts of kindness and heroism. Only got 25 years, 3 months, and 12 days to go – better write the great American novel, or swim the

DAY OF PENTECOST 2015 ROMANS 8:22-27 The weat her t hat day was suit ably bleak. The overcast sky seemed t o be aware t hat it was t he day of a funeral. Like every parish priest in England I found myself in the disconcert ing posit ion of having t o conduct the burial service for someone I'd never met . Those are t he days when English vicars curse Henry VIII and t he bizarre hist ory t hat led to the Church of England to be 'est ablished', wit h t he result t hat 'parishes' are not congregat ions, like t hey are in t he US, but geographical areas on a map; and everyone living wit hin t he boundaries of t hose few square miles are ‘Church of England’ unless t hey choose t o be somet hing else. At t hat time I had 2,000 parishioners to whom I had a responsibility, but only 200 of them ever came t o church. So, on t hat fat eful and, frankly cursed, morning as I frequent ly did, I found myself committing to God one of t he ot her 1800. The borough council’s crematorium that day was t hinly po

SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER 2015 JOHN 17:6-19 Well I want to tell you all this morning that my work here is done. There’s nothing left to do. I’ve been ordained now 22 years, been a priest for 21 of them, I’ve served in four dioceses in two provinces of the Anglican Communion, and I can now retire. My work is finished. That’s because last Tuesday Melanie invited me to Pizza Club. Nothing remarkable about that, I often find my way downstairs when the aroma of that Italian delicacy has just wafted upstairs. No, Tuesday was unusual because I was there on a mission. I was there to teach. Not the Bible, or some simple theology, but an ancient art form. A craft many hundreds of years old that sits atop the list of mankind’s greatest cultural accomplishments, the very pinnacle of all that is good and true and noble in human endeavor. I was probably one of the most qualified people in all of Pennsylvania to teach this art form, as the first ever written reference to this noble pursuit was o

SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER 2015 JOHN 15:9-17 This week I’ve been doing some research into the subject of friendship. Actually, I was surfing the internet, but ‘research’ sounds so much better, doesn’t it? It sounds like I was doing something constructive, rather than idling away Friday afternoon. So, be very suspicious when a preacher tells you they were doing research. So, I found some fascinating things about friendship. I discovered that William Scott has 6,223 friends. Facebook friends, that is. He holds the world record. Over 6,000? How is that even possible? I have 86, and some of them I rarely even think about, let alone communicate with them except at a very superficial level. I also found out that there’s a website called Rentafriend.com. Are you traveling to a new city? Do you need someone to show you around town? Maybe you want to take in a movie or enjoy a nice restaurant and need some pleasant company to share it with. Well, if you answered ‘yes’ to any of th

THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER B 2015 1 JOHN 3:1-7  I used to live near a town called Middlesbrough in the North-East of England. It has a population of around 140,000 people. Now shortly after I left the region for the US a resident named Michael O’Neill decided on the spur of the moment to take a long, once in a lifetime trip to Australia to visit a friend. He made his plans without telling anyone and off he went. A few days later his neighbors grew worried and called the police, who broke down the door of Michael’s apartment to find that he had disappeared, leaving no evidence of what had happened to him.  So far, nothing very remarkable. But it gets weird..... (read the full Sermon here): http://s3.amazonaws.com/dfc_attachments/public/documents/3206485/20150419_God_has_no_Grandkids.pdf

EASTER DAY 2015 MARK 16:1-8 I’ve discovered a new way to save time. I’m not a very good typist, and I spend quite a few hours each week at the keyboard doing this: mime typing with one finger of each hand. But, now that I have a smartphone with a voice recognition feature, I can dictate letters, emails and even sermons, and the phone types them, and I save myself maybe a couple of hours a week. The only problem with this is that what the voice recognition thing types is sometimes very different from what I say. It’s an accent thing. Even though I have the setting on ‘British English’ (like there’s some other kind) its performance is pretty hit and miss. So, for example last week I dictated the phrase “the theological content of the sermon”, which my phone typed as “the theological content of the salmon”. Smart fish. Then there was this gem: "The Bridge currently serves those in need residing in Zip code 17011." It typed, "the British army says those

At first you can’t believe it. You must have misheard. He would never do that. She couldn’t possibly. Like someone telling you you have pixies living in your vegetable garden, it’s unreal, you don’t know it is joke or this teller of news is deluded. Yet they are rational and don’t appear to be teasing. You know what your ears heard, your mind understands the meaning of the words, but your heart, the seat of your emotions takes time to catch up. Minutes turn to hours and the truth begins toRea be credible. And the denial you had been experiencing seems like a good friend. You much prefer their company to the tsunami of emotion that’s now just beginning to creep menacingly over the horizon. It will overwhelm you to a degree that you cannot imagine. I say tsunami, but tsunamis don’t sting like this, they don’t cut you and slice you like this artillery of emotions. A tidal wave is a blunt instrument that kills with bludgeoning force. This violence is more precise an

PALM SUNDAY 2015 PHILIPPIANS 2:5-11 From time to time I like to tell you about some of the differences between the British and americans, from my vantage point as a Transatlantic citizen. And in my experience, one of the most striking differences between over here and over there is the way people receive compliments. Over there, well, they don’t actually receive compliments. It’s way too vulgar to concede that you may have done something well or that your hair looks nice. So, in Britain when someone congratulates you on a great piece of work, or for acing a test, or for a really good victory in a game you’re supposed to say, “It was nothing, you’re the person who deserves all the credit … really, I just got lucky with the questions, I only studied three things and all three happened to be on the paper.” So suppose you wanted to tell a Brit that they had just preached a brilliant Palm Sunday sermon, the way you’d do that is to give them a check. Or at least a Ca

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT 2015 JEREMIAH 31:31-34 It’s been a bad week for God. I’ve given him lots of work to do. Because God is like my cleaner. I make mistakes and he goes around afterwards, clearing up the mess. Sometimes he makes it so that I never even have to face the consequences of my foolishness. Some of you know I teach a course on preaching for clergy and prospective clergy in the Diocese. And one of the points I make is that if you’re going to talk about yourself in a sermon make it self-deprecating. So don’t be the hero of the story,make yourself the butt of the joke or be the illustration of how NOT to do whatever it is you’re talking about. And my students would be proud of me this morning because, I’m warning you, I do not come out of this opening story looking good. I was in the supermarket and I was wearing my clerical collar. Now there was a lady bagging my groceries as they passed through the checkout. And she was a very talkative person. She was chatting awa

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT 2015 NUMBERS 21:4-9 

THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT 2015 EXODUS 20:1-17

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT 2015 MARK 8:31-38

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT YEAR B 2015 MARK 1:9-15

LAST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY YEAR B 2015 MARK 9:2-9