Curate Conundrums

People eh? Aren’t people annoying and a mystery? People are inconsiderate, they’re rude, obnoxious and sometimes their behaviour, well, other people eh? That’s not just a list of my attributes. They do things like sit on their phones at the cinema and rustle their popcorn, they park badly or cut us up on roundabouts, they’re impatient disrespectful and cruel, some of them don’t even attend Evensong! Some of them think we shouldn’t even be doing Evensong! They are sinners. I don’t mean the people that don’t like Evensong, though some of us might think that! No I mean the people who act in ways that are less than how we should act. But what if I told you, that those people are loved by God? What if I told you that we sometimes sin too! Even me! Yes, even me! All joking aside the two passages we heard this evening are all about love, God’s love and what it means for us to live as Christians within that love. The law of Christians is love, and I’m going to try to unpick what some of...

Preached at Evensong, St Peter Mancroft Church   It has been a disturbing couple of weeks. With mudslides devastating Sierra Leone and the enormous fascist demonstrations in Charlottesville. It can sometimes feel like things are out of control. There are no easy answers and I’m not going to patronise you by trying to neatly package it up, but what I will say is that God does not have favourites. One of the many things that disgusts me about fascism is the notion of white supremacy. It’s an ideology that those of us who are white are the master race, that we have the right to enslave other people wo are not like us, because we are better than them. As Christians it is our role in society to condemn these ideologies in the strongest possible terms, we shouldn’t just be anti-fascist but anti-hate and anti-discrimination. These ideologies are not compatible with the gospel or with being a Christian. Being a racist is a sin because it violates one of the two primary commandments, lo...