Sermons and Talks

Reflection #106 (8th June 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

So today we’re exploring this concept of faith. This is a bit of a generalisation but over the years I’ve picked up the impression that a lot of us who end up in Unitarian congregations are a bit uncertain, or ambivalent – or even squeamish – about the very notion of faith (perhaps in large part because we’re not entirely sure what it means). Do we really want to call ourselves ‘people of faith’ collectively, or consider ourselves as ‘having faith’ personally, when the way the word is often used in common parlance gives it a number of connotations that we might not feel entirely at ease with?

Reflection #105 (1st June 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Questions, questions! We Unitarians tend to think of ourselves as people who love the questions – people who like to question everything – perhaps people who aren’t satisfied with easy answers. So I don’t imagine I’m going to have to do a particularly hard-sell on the virtue of asking questions! But our service today is focused on beautiful questions. What makes a question beautiful, I wonder?

Reflection #104 (27th April 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

It seems important, to me, that we take some time at least once a year to think about our purpose as a church – and to remind ourselves of the part we each play in fulfilling that purpose – all of us. As the Minister-with-a-capital-M I’m most often the one who’s standing up at the front, facilitating groups, or sending emails – and I’m delighted to be in a position to do so, to lead this congregation, to spend most of my waking hours thinking and writing and organising and furthering the cause of Unitarianism – but ministry is a collective effort. It has to be. I’m just one person. If the work of this church rested on my efforts alone then that would significantly limit what we can do and be. But just imagine what we might be able to create together if we harnessed more of our gifts! There is so much potential in this congregation for us to collectively dream something wonderful (or perhaps I should say even more wonderful!) into being. I’m pretty proud of what we’re doing already.

Reflection #103 (20th April 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

As I hinted at the top of the service, Easter can be a tricky day for Unitarians, as each of us is likely to sit in a different relation to the Christian tradition. And the Easter story is challenging in a lot of different ways at once. In the mainstream churches there will be much more of a sense of having gone on a journey of preparation through Lent, and the build-up through Holy Week, giving a lot more time and space to linger over the story of Jesus’ downfall and suffering in worldly terms, before arriving at Easter Day and the sense of triumph that goes with the story of his resurrection.

Reflection #102 (6th April 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

When I first started thinking about this theme as something we might want to explore in a service, I brought it up in conversation with a few friends, some of whom are religious types and others of whom are really not. At first, I was somewhat surprised to find that people seemed to struggle somewhat with the concept – what precisely does it mean, ‘The Sacred’? – but then as I tried to share my own sense of the sacred I realised… it’s quite a slippery idea. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, given that we often talk of sacred things as being ineffable, somehow beyond our human ability to express in words, too profound to speak of. Still, we try to find a way.

Reflection #101 (23rd March 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

As I said at the top of the service, this past week has been ‘Neurodiversity Celebration Week’, and so this morning we’re exploring the premise that is simply stated by the autistic author Temple Grandin in words that are on the front of your order of service: ‘The world needs all kinds of minds.’

Part of the impetus behind tackling this theme today was a conversation I had with a friend recently – and I should probably say upfront that this is going to be perhaps a more personal reflection than usual – I am hoping it will be useful for me to share a little of my own first-hand experience on this occasion. So I was speaking to my friend – a new friend, someone I haven’t known very long – and I mentioned in passing that I am autistic. And he replied ‘you don’t seem autistic, if you don’t mind me saying’.

Reflection #100 (2nd March 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

As I said at the top of today’s service, our exploration today is around the need to nurture meaningful connections, in a world where many are lonely, alienated and disconnected. Even in this densely populated city – we must be getting on towards 10 million Londoners now –though we bump up against each other every day it’s still so easy to feel anonymous and isolated. And in theory we’re very connected in a virtual sense too, to the whole world, via the internet. But despite this, I suspect most of us would acknowledge that true connection isn’t always easy to find.

Reflection #99 (23rd February 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I want to start my reflection (and I should say though this is listed as a mini-reflection in the OOS it turned out to be not-so-mini after all) with an echo of those words from the Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr: ‘All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain… If we don’t find a way to transform our pain, we will always transmit it to those around us or turn it against ourselves… If your religion is not teaching you how to recognize, hold, and transform suffering, it is junk religion.’

Reflection #98 (9th February 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

There’s a saying that used to be used a lot in Unitarian and Universalist churches, as a kind-of covenant, and it starts with the phrase: ‘Love is the doctrine of this church.’ And I don’t think it would be controversial to say that love is what we think we’re about as a community – it pops up on a regular basis in our hymns and prayers – it’s right at the centre of who we are and what we do (or at least what we aspire to do). But, strangely, we don’t often make it the particular focus of a service – possibly because it’s just too big a topic to get a handle on – or too slippery a concept.

Reflection #97 (14th January 2025 for OneLight Gathering at Essex Church)

Thanks for inviting me to join you tonight – from the moment when Alison invited me to share on Universal Themes there was one thought that I couldn’t get out of my mind – and I’m ever-so-slightly hesitant to share it as it perhaps seems a bit heavy but the fact that it’s been such an insistent thought feels like a sign that it’s what I’m meant to speak about tonight.