Sermon - Standing at the Threshold

Woman Standing in a Doorway, Edvard Munch, 1906

Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist at St George’s Bloomsbury on Sunday 19th February 2023 (Year A, Next before Lent) based on readings from Exodus 24.12-end, 2 Peter 1.16-end and Matthew 17.1-9-end.

You can watch a recording of the sermon (cropped and clipped from the church private facebook group) below:

Prayers of Intercession - Do Not Worry

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1895

Prayers written for the Sung Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook on Thursday 16th February 2023 (Year A, Second before Lent) based on readings from Genesis 1.1-2.3 and Matthew 6.25-end.

Choral Classics - My Beloved Spake

Egon Tschirch: Song of Songs, No. 11 (picture cycle 1923)

It was a great joy to introduce Choral Classics at St Stephen Walbrook this week, inspired by the text and themes of the Song of Songs. My script is below. Watch a recording below: 

Prayers - Teach Us O Lord

Joseph Beuys, Four Blackboards, 1972 (Tate)

It was a great pleasure to officiate at Choral Evensong at St Stephen Walbrook on Wednesday 8th February. I wrote these prayers in response to the words of part of Psalm 119, sung by the choir during the service. 

The text in the image above reads ‘He who in 1972 can live carefree and sleep peacefully despite knowing that two thirds of humanity are hungry or dying of starvation while a large proportion of the well-fed third must take slimming cures in order to stay alive should ask himself what kind of man one is and whether, moreover, he is a man at all.’

You can watch the service online below or at this link.

Choral Classics - Ev'ry time I feel the spirit

James Keay-Bright, Trinity Redemption, 2013

It was a great pleasure to introduce Choral Classics at St Stephen Walbrook on Wednesday 8th February 2023. My script is below. You can watch the recording below or on YouTube at this link.

Start:Stop - Talking the talk and walking the walk

George Grotz, Metropolis, 1916

Start:Stop at St Stephen Walbrook enables busy people to start their day by stopping to reflect. Ten minute reflections are repeated on the quarter hour, from 7.45am until 9.00am every Tuesday morning, beginning with a reading from scripture, followed by a reflection based on an event from this week in history, with space for silence and prayer. You can hear a recording of this week’s reflection at this link and read the script below.

Good morning and welcome to St Stephen Walbrook and our Start:Stop reflection. Today is the anniversary of the birth of master-storyteller Charles Dickens, whose Night Walks through the streets of Victorian London provided the inspiration for novels and short stories that revealed his concern for the poor and the oppressed. 

Dickens had an on-off relationship with the church into which he was baptised. Though, by his own admission, at times he struggled to do so himself, he was highly critical of those who attended church every week to say the creeds but who seemed to fail to act upon them. People who “talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk.”

A criticism shared by the author of the First Letter of John, writing to the church in the first century. His readers are exhorted to live the word - through acts of righteousness.

Our reading this morning is from the second chapter of the First Letter of John.

Prayers of Intercession - The Feast of Candlemas

La presentación de Cristo en el templo, Kelly Latimore

Prayers of Intercession written for the Choral Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook on Thursday 2nd February 2023. The Feast of Candlemas. Based on texts from Malachi 3.1-5, Psalm 24, Hebrews 2.14-end and Luke 2.22-40.