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An address for Harvest Festival We have just sung We Plough the Fields and Scatter, one of those great traditional Harvest hymns, full of gratitude for abundance, and rightly so. I feel the contrast with the story of Ruth. I really felt it when Naomi arrived back in Bethlehem and says, “I went away full,…
An Address reflecting on 25 years since 9/11 Let’s start with poor Job… By the time Job’s friends arrive, almost everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. His animals have been stolen or destroyed. His servants have been killed. His children have died when the house they are in collapses. Then Job himself becomes…
An Address for the East Anglian Women’s Group Service, 12th July 2026 I fell in love with my husband while we watched a murmuration of starlings above Brighton Pier. The birds moved as though the sky itself had become alive: hundreds of separate creatures, each one entirely itself, forming a single changing body that no…
An Address for anyone who feels the pain of our fragmented world I enjoyed reading the first poem I read This making of a whole self takes such a very long time. I am terrible at sewing and at school I famously broke not one but two sewing machines. BUT, I love the metaphor of…
An Address for Ipswich Pride 2026 Our service this morning is called Mud and Sunshine, for quite personal reasons which I’ll shed light on later. It may sound a strange title for a Pride Service. Pride is often bright and joyful, rainbow flags, music, colour and protest, it’s about visibility and celebration. Rightly so. A…
You have seen I am a collector; I have all sorts of weird and wonderful objects in my life. I wonder whether you do too. I don’t mean valuable things, or impressive things, or things that would make sense to anyone else at first glance. I mean the small things we keep on a shelf,…
An address for Whit Sunday That Which We Seek Is Seeking Us On the front of your Order of Service it says, open your hands if you want to be held. It reminds me of a child holding their open trusting hands up knowing that their grown up is there, it reminds me that all…
Five hundred years ago, in February 1526, a scurrilous and revolutionary book began to appear on the streets of England. Immediately, the religious and secular authorities, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cuthbert Tunstall, and Henry VIII himself, set about suppressing it. Copies were seized and publicly burned at St. Paul’s Cross in London, although enough…
Our story begins with weeping. Mary is outside the tomb of her beloved Jesus. That is where John places us on Easter morning. Not with a blaze of certainty and triumph, not with everything neatly resolved, but with a strong and grieving woman. She is in this place of loss, trying to make sense of…
The mission of Jesus was, in essence, the building of community: a community that embraced people of both genders, of different classes and religious backgrounds, of different nationalities and ethnicities. Although at its heart it was a Jewish vision, it was also universal in its scope and it’s potential. The Messianic beliefs of prophets like…
