Next month, so just in a week or so’s time, we begin our deanery vocations month. It’s quite well timed with today’s readings – in the Gospel, Christ calls the apostles Simon, Andrew, John and James to follow Him – the adventure of a lifetime. In this deanery, we have one person actually from this deanery training for the priesthood in Rome, Luke Theobald, and his reflections have been put on the back of the bulletin over previous vocations months. We also have a priest in tr

Just under a fortnight ago, we were celebrating the Epiphany. As I’m sure we all know, the wise men brought the Christ-child three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. And as the hymn We Three Kings points out, gold honours Christ as king, frankincense points to His divinity, and myrrh to His future burial. “Glorious now behold him arise, King and God and sacrifice.” Today we’ve fast-forwarded a bit, to the scene of St John the Baptist pointing out Christ at the River Jordan.

One of the classic hymns for today’s celebration is We Three Kings of Orient Are. It’s quite a clever hymn, because it’s simple enough to learn it from primary school, yet it packs in theological teaching going back centuries, about the meaning of the three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to sing the hymn or give you a theological lecture on the Christological and soteriological meaning of the three gifts. Instead, a sho

God becoming one of us is truly amazing! After celebrating Christmas Day and the feast of the Holy Family, this Sunday we can begin to unpack a bit more what God becoming flesh really means for us. But it is truly a mystery – something of which the human mind cannot fully plumb the depths. We can understand something of it, but our limited human intelligence can never know the fullness of the infinite God. The Prologue to St John’s Gospel, as the reading we just heard is some

Now that the Christmas season has begun, we celebrate today the feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. This year, in the readings for Year A, we are faced with the scene of St Joseph being warned in a dream to escape with his family to Egypt. They have to leave now, right in the middle of the night. Lesson number one: being faithful to the Lord means both great joys and also inconvenience and suffering. The first and second reading talk about family life, respect

Each Christmas, there are different traditions, songs and readings we are used to hearing which bring a sense of comfort, and also, each year, they come up with something new, such as the latest adventure of Kevin the Carrot.  Sometimes I find that with some of the older carols and translations of the Bible, the words sound a bit like Yorkshire-speak.  For example, in the King James Version of the Bible, when the angel appears to the shepherds, it says they were “sore afraid”