Mount Calvary Sermons

TWELFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 2016 LUKE 12:32-40 The cruise from Westminster Pier on the River Thames to the Tower of London only took half an hour, but the effects on me have lasted a lifetime. I must have been ten at the time of that school field trip. Although I lived only 30 miles from the capital, I had never been to the Tower. But I'd listened to my history teachers, I'd heard the stories of traitors and tortures, betrayals and beheadings, mayhem and murder. I looked over the side of boat into the unwashed face of Father Thames – the same brown water that condemned men and women stared forlornly at hundreds of years earlier, as they made that same journey I, in my schoolboy excitement, was making. We arrived at the Tower and in the way that hildren do, I gazed, transfixed at instruments of slow death, and instruments of fast, like the chopping block where Ann Boleyn bade farewell to her head, or should that be where she bade farewell to her body? At the time, it was the gruesome stories and the bloody