Sermons & Other Words

Graceful Judgement


Sermon Year B - Trinity 19
Hebrews 4.12-end, Mark 10.17-31
Revd. Matthew Peat

It’s the stuff of fire and brimstone. The words we have heard this morning are just the ammunition a preacher needs to frighten his listeners. It’s what captivated the imaginations of medieval artists who depicted the words they heard on wall paintings in churches. Just take a trip to Easby near Richmond or Pickering and see just how vivid the images are.

Nowadays we tend to treat those wall paintings as historic artefacts, something to be gazed upon with curiosity and so we don’t take them too seriously. That might even be true when we think about judgement as a whole. If that’s so then our readings this morning invite us to think again.

In Hebrews we heard that ‘all are naked and laid bare to the one whom we must render an account.’

And then in our Gospel Jesus when asked ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ speaks of both the commandments but also more. His questioner is sent away ‘shocked’ and ‘grieving’ because though he has followed the commandments it isn’t enough.

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Blackberries and the Kingdom of God


Sermon Year B - Harvest Thanksgiving
Joel 2.21-27, Matthew 6.25-33
Revd. Matthew Peat

Where do blackberries come from? Was one of the questions I asked at an Assembly at Austhorpe School last week. One little boy with his hand up replied “The supermarket.” Thankfully a good many more knew that at this time of year blackberries are quote “in the bushes”.

The humble blackberry is one of the joys of this time of year, something we can all harvest and take home for our pies and crumbles. Yet as I went on to tell the children the blackberry is not a cost free fruit.

The bramble on which it grows is prickly and if you pick them you’ll acquire a few thorns along the way too. The blackberry the fruit that makes us glad. The prickly picking that elicits the cry “ouch.”

And there lies the connection with our Gospel. At its end we heard ‘Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness’ whilst being commanded not to worry. The fruit- the kingdom of God. The prickly stem – the worry, the struggle to keep that kingdom in our minds amidst our daily lives.

And how we worry. We worry about small things. We worry about big things. We know, intellectually at least that worry cannot ‘add a single hour to our span of life’ and yet we do it anyway.

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Giving is Good for You


Sermon Year B - Giving Sunday
2 Corinthians 8.1-9, Matthew 6.19-21
Revd. Matthew Peat

In giving we receive. That’s what we called it this time last year when we launched a giving campaign to increase our financial income. It ended two weeks later with a Harvest Lunch of Thanksgiving. I was delighted with the result. We increased our income, including gift aid by just under a third. There was much to be thankful for.

However we were starting from what I felt given our number and our relative affluence was a low income. Consequently though we’ve made good progress there is more to be done. We are still some way short of meeting our commitments not least to our diocese through our parish share. We have not paid what we have been asked for over a number of years which is something of an embarrassment.

Yet we will get there not because I stand here and make you feel guilty, I don’t want to do that anyway, but because we are growing and know that our giving is central to who we are as followers of Jesus Christ.

Money is of course part of our life. We need it to pay the bills, to support those whom we love, to enjoy our life and to be free from worry. I am not immune to those feelings, quite the opposite and so I have to keep asking myself, as we all should, whether these notes have an excessive hold on me. Continue reading “Giving is Good for You”

The Fear of the Lord


Choral Evensong
Job 28, Hebrews 11.17-31
Revd. Matthew Peat

I have what I think of as a healthy fear of mountains. It’s been fashioned by a good deal of experience climbing them in the Lake District. It’s a fear that recognises their danger. How they need to be treated with respect. How one should not set off to climb them without being prepared.

So even on the sunniest day, treading familiar paths, all weather gear and the right maps are in my rucksack. Importantly however this fear of the mountains is a good thing. Without that fear I might take stupid risks.

Fear then though we might often think otherwise can be a good thing, it can help us. Job in our first reading had discovered that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ So I want us tonight to think a bit about how fear and wisdom belong together.

If we hand in mind images of God solely based on some verses we could highlight from the Bible, then we would understand fear in a very particular way. Indeed we’d likely be here with knees knocking ready to hear a bit of fire and brimstone from the pulpit, “We’re all doomed!”

Thankfully we hold those texts alongside that of what we know of God through Jesus. The fear we know then comes to us in a human face, a face who looks on us with love.

And whilst that shouldn’t undermine the potency or sense of reality of what might happen if… (think climbing the mountain on a winters day in trainers) or as if we don’t know our place, we are not God after all – this Godly fear, understood properly, helps shape our living and in some mysterious way fashions in us something of the wisdom of which Job spoke. Continue reading “The Fear of the Lord”

Holy Hands


Sermon Year B – Trinity 9
Ephesians 4.1-16, John 6.24-34
Revd. Matthew Peat

Have you ever wondered what Jesus’ hands looked like? I don’t think I had until last week. I was sat in Leeds Station waiting for a train and found myself thinking about this sermon, looking at peoples’ hands.

So as I looked around, I saw children’s hands, holding onto their parent. Hands grasping baggage; holiday or business. Lovers holding hands and there was even a gentleman with a prosthetic hand.   And I had been thinking about hands for three reasons.

Firstly the post communion prayer from last week that had been in my mind since we prayed it last week ‘strengthen for service, Lord, the hands that have taken holy things’.

Secondly because of that demand at the end of the Gospel, when those who have followed Jesus, heard his teaching on the bread of heaven and say to him ‘Give us this bread always.’ The bread Jesus talked about was himself and we when we come here we open our hands to receive him.

And lastly because of that connection between strengthening our hands for service, receiving Christ and the theme of that first reading from St. Paul where he writes of growing up and of ministry used in the service of Christ to build up his body.

Put together, they seem to be telling me that we are invited to see our hands as holy.

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More than Meets the Eye


Sermon Year B – Trinity 7 – Sermon for the Baptism of Elliot Christie
Ephesians 2.11-end, Mark 6.30-34, 53-end
Revd. Matthew Peat

If you’ve ever listened to Saturday Live on Radio 4, you’ll know that every week someone gets to choose their inheritance tracks.

These two tracks comprise one song or piece of music they cherish, usually because it reminds them of a particular time, place or story together with a track they would like to pass on to the next generation.   For both we hear why they have chosen them.

Listening to it recently, with Elliot Peter Christie’s baptism in mind, made me ask what would be the inheritance track of my faith. What words rather than a song would I want to pass onto him that might accompany him through his life?

I decided that for me, the one thing, the one phrase, in a slightly obtuse way, about the faith so central to my life, would simply be this, that there’s more to life than meets the eye.

There’s more to life than meets the eye.

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What’s it to be; Paranoia or Hope?


Sermon Year B – Trinity 6
Ephesians 1.3-14, Mark 6.14-29
Revd. Matthew Peat

‘It’s sometimes been said that if someone came up to you in the street and whispered, ‘They’ve found out! Run!’, nine out of ten of us would.’ These are the words which Rowan Williams began his Enthronement sermon as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2003.

I want to begin there because I think that by the time Kind Herod reached the end of his days he had come to embody the kind of paranoia that sees people out to get him at every turn. When he thinks that every conversation in hushed tones is part of a plot to overthrow him.

And so stripped of all his defences, mindful of the choices he made to protect that power, I think we can be pretty sure that if Herod were in the shopping centre at Crossgates and someone crept up behind him and said run – he would.

We meet him this morning as he begins to hear rumours about Jesus, another threat to his power. No doubt the order he gave to murder John (to preserve his popularity after a foolish promise) has worried him, so in his paranoid state he thinks ‘John whom I beheaded has been raised’.

History tells us that the traits which defined Herod have defined despotic leaders ever since. Even today we can look around the world and see those who will do almost anything to protect their power. But in some small way we all know a bit of what it is to be paranoid, to be anxious and fearful to think that others are talking about usand plotting our downfall.

In contrast to Herod’s paranoia that defines the Gospel St. Paul in our Epistle gives a different vision for life. A life lived ‘so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live to the praise of his glory.’ Paul invites us to live in hope.

And as we think of his words I think we know enough about Paul to know that he wasn’t immune to worry and anxiety, those things which left unchecked lead to paranoia, rather his security wasn’t bound to what other people thought of him. Continue reading “What’s it to be; Paranoia or Hope?”

Choral Evensong Sermon


Jeremiah 20.1-11a, Romans 14.1-17
Revd. Matthew Peat

We’re not here to judge. We’re here to love.

One of the things you have to try and learn to do when you chair meetings, is to keep them moving, and not let them get bogged down in minute detail. Of course sometimes that detail is a necessary part of the discussion but for much of the time your job as chair is to keep things moving to keep the meetings gaze firmly on the big picture.

In the reading we heard from Epistle to the Romans this evening, they are it seems stuck in the detail and cannot seem to find a way out. They are arguing over this and that about what food to eat or not and the consequences for eating such food. Paul’s chairman’s letter comes as the chair to try and help them.

Interestingly he doesn’t say to them that what they are discussing is unimportant rather that they have lost sight of the big picture and so their life together has become a stumbling block for others for they have ended up arguing about judgement and how their actions will have eternal consequences.

Listening to Paul’s words you can sense his despair (echoed by church leaders down the ages) as he tries to tell them they are wasting too much time on the wrong questions. They should certainly not be worried about judgement for that is God’s department instead he says they are to focus on building the kingdom of God, a kingdom built on righteousness, peace and joy. Continue reading “Choral Evensong Sermon”