Month: July 2025

Colossians 3.1–11, Luke 12.13-21 

The Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 3 August 2025

Eldroth, Clapham

I don’t expect you to have much sympathy for me. I’m the man in the story who asked Jesus to persuade my brother to divide the inheritance with me. 

I don’t expect you to have much sympathy for me because since that day I’ve felt condemned as the greedy one. And maybe I was being greedy then. But there’s more to my story than that. 

Scapegoating me leaves everyone else to get away without thinking too hard about their own attitude to wealth and possessions. That’s not what The Teacher intended. That won’t help any of us.

You see, I don’t think my intentions were that dishonourable or unusual. There was money in the family, and I was dreaming of one day having a share in that money. Like you would, perhaps, if you were in the same position. 

All I wanted was some capital to put into a small property. Somewhere in a slightly nicer part of town, a good environment for my wife and I to bring up our family, better schools there, better prospects. Just that little dream. I’d got friends who’d made that move – it had worked out well for them. I had all the leaflets from the estate agents. If my estimates about the inheritance added up, my little dream could come true. 

I thought my brother would understand that. I know he had little dreams of his own that were very similar to mine. But somehow his estimates about the inheritance didn’t add up with mine. Somehow what had been a decent enough relationship between brothers went very sour, as neither of us would give up on our dreams. 

As my brother held the purse-strings it looked like my dream was doomed to die. So when I saw him in the town that day I thought that Jesus might intervene for me. 

I asked the Teacher to tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. I was shocked by his reply: “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” 

Well, I thought Jesus was a judge and arbiter. I thought that was the whole point of a Messiah, to be a judge over our affairs. Every religion I could think of has placed a judgmental God at its core. I knew plenty of religious devotees who felt their beliefs entitled them to condemn others to hell and damnation. 

But here was this man, Jesus, resisting my plea, refusing to judge my brother, refusing to arbitrate in our affairs, throwing the responsibility back onto us. This was breathtaking and very, very, challenging. Because now we had to face each other and work out a solution in the light of what Jesus said next. 

He told a story about a man obsessed with the idea of building bigger and bigger barns to store more and more of his grain and goods, thinking this would set him up for life. The story ends with the man’s premature death, and God saying to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ 

The Teacher told this story to warn us against greed. To show “how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” It wasn’t a judgment on us, but it left us to make our own judgments about what we should do with our obsessions. 

At first I thought the story condemned my brother. After all, he was the one wanting to keep the wealth to himself, to set himself up for life while excluding me and my dreams. 

But then I realised it could also be about me. Because I too was storing up things for myself – in my head, by living in a dream stimulated by other people’s ideas about the good life, surrounded by estate agents’ marketing materials and glossy brochures from fancy schools. 

The teacher’s words left my brother and I with a few options about seeing this problem in a different way. They all revolved around another question he raised but left us to answer: a question that seems to hold the key to a satisfied life. What does it mean to be “rich toward God”? 

That’s a very challenging question. It suggests that what you most value in life influences the sort of life you live. If you most value wealth you’ll probably be very smart but very anxious; if you most value God you’ll also value things like love and community, peace and reconciliation, and you may not wear the most expensive clothes but you’ll be satisfied. 

I imagine that if you are “rich toward God” then creating wealth means spreading kindness, doing good for others, protecting the vulnerable and defending those who are victimised. 

My brother and I were left realising that we would only be truly happy and fulfilled when the things we think will make us rich become the same as the things we think will make us rich towards God. And we knew that that could take some time, some prayer, some work.

Thankfully there are many other religious devotees whose beliefs have inspired them to faithful, careful, generous living, whose lives and words help us to appreciate what it means be “rich toward God”. 

People like Jean-Baptiste Vianney, known as the Cure d’Ars, a spiritual guide who the church remembers this week. He said, “Ours is a noble task: that of prayer and love. To pray and to love, that constitutes the greatest possible happiness for us in this life.”

Note

This sermon is a rewrite of Being rich toward God, preached in Croxteth in 2004. Other versions have included: Plan alone, build alone, indulge alone, and die alone! A rabbi breaks the rules (Eldroth, Keasden, 2019) and The rabbi who didn’t play by the rules, and his parable of the stupid rich man, (Somerset, 2016).

John Davies

Colossians 2.6-19, Luke 11.1-13

The Sixth Sunday after Trinity, 27 July 2025

Austwick, Clapham

In these troubled times we’re living through, God might seem far away. 

In these broken times, how we long for God’s healing. In these restless times, how we long for God’s peace. In these days where what was solid seems to be disintegrating before us, how we long for some divine direction which will stop us from heading down blind alleys, or rabbit holes which lead to hatred.

Will God help us when it hurts? Will God help us bring an end to the massacre of innocents? Can God show us how to overcome those things which divide us, how to escape our cycles of condemning and being condemned? Will God guide us into ways of goodness and hope?

How we long to find a way to ‘shorten the distance between ourselves and God’. [1]

The good news is that there is a ‘way’ to do this, and a ‘how’. The way is Jesus and the how is prayer.

Jesus taught us a prayer to help us enter into a different way of knowing, an alternative way of perceiving reality. A way which removes all boundaries, barriers, and divisions between ourselves, God and others.

It is very simple, the way he taught it. 

When we begin our prayers with ‘Our Father who art in heaven,’ this gives us a sense of God beyond; a God in whom, and for whom, ‘all things in heaven and on earth were created’. A God we can be confident in, for he is fully invested in us and in all his creation.

When we then dare to pray ‘Thy kingdom come’, this encourages us that God is to be found, within us, and inside the life of this messy world. 

And so, strengthened to believe that God is indeed active here and now, we can confidently pray, ‘Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’.

St Paul wrote that ‘in Jesus all things hold together’. And in his prayer, Jesus teaches us that heaven and earth do hold together. The Lord’s Prayer has, at its heart, the reconciliation of all things. 

The Lord’s Prayer does not express weak hope: it’s full of faithful expectation that God is acting, and will continue to act in a world which is as fractured and fractious today as it was in Jesus’ time. 

It is precisely in this world of people divided, of creatures harmed, and land and seas despoiled, that Jesus develops his radical unifying and inclusive vision of the kingdom of God. With all his heart he longs to bring all people and things together as one, beloved and cherished and dignified in him. 

In the holy city Jesus cried out his heart’s longing, ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem… how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you were not willing!’ Jesus’ desire is for the unity of the world: for people to ‘come from east and west, from north and south, to eat in the kingdom of God,’ as he said. 

Jesus wants us to remember Isaiah’s ‘wolf living with the lamb, leopard lying down with the kid’, and the Psalmist’s vision of all living things united in worship: ‘Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds . . .Young men and women alike, old and young together… praising the Lord!’ 

For Jesus women and children are first in his kingdom. He embraces the leper and, as he throws down the tables of the money changers, he welcomes the outcasts and the ritually unclean: ‘The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them’. 

Notice how so many of Jesus’ sayings are about overcoming separation, loss and division. He evokes a world where things once separated, now joyously come together:

The woman is reunited with her lost coin. The shepherd once again embraces his sheep.
The yeast is mixed with the flour. The vine is joined to the branches.
The birds come to roost in the branches. Things old and new are to be treasured.
The enemy is to be loved. The prodigal is restored to his father.
The wounded Jewish traveller rests in the healing arms of a hated Samaritan.
God’s will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable.
The kingdom is both now and not yet, here and still to come.

The most significant sign of Jesus’ inclusive kingdom is the meal at which Jesus eats with tax-collectors and sinners. At his open table everyone, regardless of shame or status, has an honoured place. Breaking bread with all, Jesus shows his readiness to overturn barriers and break social taboos; to unite. 

These ideas came from a place of prayer and contemplation, which were at the heart of Jesus’ life and practice. The good news for us, in these broken times is that, if we find a place of prayer and contemplation, and pray the way that Jesus taught us, then we can go back into the world empowered to ‘love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, and with all our strength’; to join him in his healing and reconciling work.

When we pray ‘Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’, then we show our intention to join in God’s work of healing divisions, bringing things together, and making peace. For these things start with our heart.

When we ask ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’, we show we understand what it means to be forgiven, and that God who unconditionally loves us, will help us  to love and forgive others.

To the Colossians Paul wrote, ‘As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.’ 

Faith in Christ does not mean us escaping this wicked world. Rather the opposite; God wills for us to grow and flourish in his love right in the middle of this muddled world. 

God longs for us to walk with him, outwards from our place of prayer, to help him bring peace where there is conflict, unity where there is division. 

Beginning with prayer, our very lives can help shorten the distance between the world and God.

Notes

[1] A revision of I know this is the way the world is, because Donald Trump told me / Lord, teach me how to pray, preached in Somerset, 2016; substantially based on the chapter ‘Jesus the mystic’ in Andrew D. Mayes, Another Christ, Re-envisioning ministry, and his discussion of ‘shortening the distance between ourselves and God’. See original sermon for all bible references.

Colossians 1.15-28, Luke 10.38-42

The Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 20 July 2025

Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth

Martha was one for holding on. She found it hard to let things go.

Even when Jesus came to visit, rather than sit with him, Martha kept on doing ‘her many tasks’. We can imagine her dusting away around Jesus’ feet where Mary sat talking with him, or interrupting their conversation by loudly bashing pots and pans in the kitchen.

Luke says that Martha was ‘distracted’ by the tasks she set herself. 

Was she holding on to the idea that Jesus would praise her for her hard work? 

Was she possessed by the Protestant work ethic centuries before it was invented? You know, the belief that inspired the joke that “Hard work never killed anyone, but why take the chance?”

Or was Martha caught up in some sort of rivalry with her sister, anxious to prove herself as the more virtuous of the two, by being the more practical? [2]

Jesus wanted to help her let go of this burden of work she put on herself, to rest awhile, and find her sense of self-worth in simply being with him. 

The work ethic, with its focus on activity, is a strong theme in Christianity. It has its place, of course:  things do have to be done, and often we are the ones to do them. 

But Christianity says something else as well: namely, that your real value and ultimate sense of worth do not depend on what you do, but on who you are. You are a child of God. Your value does not depend on your being good by keeping busy. You are valued, full stop. You are loved, just as you are.

Jesus asked Martha, in the middle of her everyday routine, to recognise what she was holding onto, so that she could let go of those parts of it which were harmful. 

Jesus did this repeatedly with people he encountered: 

• like the disciples he invited to ‘follow him’; in other words, to let go of their work and their family responsibilities, the security of their income and social status, to be new people in his service; 
• and like the Scribes and the Pharisees who he challenged time and again to let go of those aspects of the old Law of Moses which crushed the spirit and exploited the poor, to embrace the Good News of the Kingdom.

It is everywhere in Jesus’ teachings. Remember when he asked a man he met on the road to follow him, and the man replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ 

Or the other man who told him, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’ Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’ [3]

These are hard sayings of Jesus, because we instinctively think that the two men had good reasons to delay before they came along with him – family reasons: burying the father, saying goodbye to the family. Why would Jesus criticise them for that? 

Maybe because he had seen that behind their actions were things they needed to let go of. 

It could have been that the man who wanted to bury his father was holding on to the need to be the one person in the family who could make the funeral arrangements. Could he not leave it to his other brothers to take the lead in this family funeral? Was he distracted by a sibling rivalry which he needed to let go of?

And maybe the man who wanted to say goodbye to those at home was holding on to a desire for attention from his family. Was he distracted by needing the affirmation he’d receive from them if they gave him a good send-off? 

Jesus said, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’ 

What did he mean by ‘the better part’? Perhaps the better part is simply the art of letting go and letting be – or to use that old devotional expression, ‘letting go and letting God’. 

When we let go of our obsessions and urges and needy desires, then there are no more distractions: we become able to give God permission to enter the space that letting go creates in our hearts, to open our spirit to the freedom which is ours in Christ, as we accept ourselves as being loved and valued just as we are. 

For Martha, stepping away from her cleaning and sitting down with Jesus and her sister might create the space for her to see herself, and Mary, and their relationship, differently and better. That period of ‘creative suspension’ of normal life could help the women break the tired old habits that had formed between them, and let something new be born. [4]

Have you ever watched children making sandcastles: how happy they are spending lots of time working on creating something lovely, but how they are just as content when the tide comes in to wash that thing away and let them start again. That’s what we feel like when we let go and let God.

Letting go of the urge to try to control everything that is happening in our world, we find growing within our spirit the expectation that God who holds all things together, will make all things new, including ourselves, with each and every tide of life. 

One of the most active of 20th Century Christian activists, Dorthy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, wrote of the importance of letting-go. She said, “We must contain ourselves in patience, remembering each morning that our main job is to love God, and to serve Him, and if we don’t get things done due to interruptions, well, it cannot be helped, and God will take care of what we leave undone. But a tranquil spirit is important. St. Teresa says that God cannot rest in an unquiet heart. I have to remember that many times during the day.” [5]

You may recall the words spoken over you at confirmation: ‘God has called you by name and made you his own’. What could possibly be more valuable than that?

Notes

[1] This sermon is a rewrite of Luke 10 – On Martha and letting go, St Gabriel’s, Toxteth, 2010, which was based on Luke 10 – On Letting Go, Good Shepherd, Croxteth, 2007, and Galatians 5, Luke 9: Family misfortunes – the difficulties of desire, Good Shepherd, Croxteth, 2010. Including content drawn from Rev Dr Alan Billings, Thought for the Day, 14 May 2007 (not accessible online in July 2025), and Sylvia Clare, The Art of Letting Go, Positive Health Online, issue 59, December 2000.

[2] See my Illuminating what makes Martha mad, preached in Somerset, 2013, Austwick and Clapham, 2022.

[3] Luke 9.57-62.

[4] Pari Center, Gentle Action.

[5] Dorothy Day, widely quoted, from a letter to Joe Zarrella, March 5, 1940. See eg., Jim Forest,  Extracts from the writings of Dorothy Day, selected by Jim Forest. NancyAndJimForest.com.

Colossians 1.1-14, Luke 10.25-37

The Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 13 July 2025

Austwick, Keasden

The story of the Good Samaritan is a parable that ‘parables’ us – in other words, we see ourselves in it, and where it puts us, may be an uncomfortable place. 

Jesus told this story because he knew that when the lawyer asked him, “Who is my neighbour?” he ‘wanted to justify himself’. He wanted Jesus to confirm to him what he  firmly believed about himself: that he was already loving his neighbour; he prided himself in being a compassionate conservative: he always donated to the Temple charity.

Jesus’ parable shocked the self-satisfied lawyer because it caused him to see himself not as the saviour in the story, but as one of those who passed by on the other side, waking him up to the uncomfortable reality that his compassion was strictly limited, it did not extend to situations like this. And even more humbling, it brought him face to face with the possibility that those people he always avoided, always ‘othered’, those awful Samaritans, could be more moral than he was. [1]

When Jesus asked hm, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”, the lawyer couldn’t even bring himself to name him, the Samaritan. All he could say, through gritted teeth, was, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’

The power in the parables is that they are stories drawn from real life. They are unavoidably close-to-home. If Jesus was retelling the parable of the Good Samaritan today what true-to-life story might he use? Maybe….

On the busy A-road, a young man on a quad bike takes a corner too fast, somersaults over a low wall and ends up in a ditch trapped beneath his smoking bike. The chairman of the District Chamber of Trade glides by in his BMW5 – too wrapped up in a phone call to stop for the accident. And on the opposite carriageway, some ladies in a Picanto on the way to their bridge club, break their chatter for a moment to tut-tut at the quad bike rider’s off-road exit, then continue to dawdle along.

The one vehicle which does screech to a halt is a beaten-up old transit van, out of which jump three young Asian men, bearded and hooded, heading out of the city. They jump the wall, and pull the young man out of the wreckage just moments before his quad bike explodes in flames; ask him where he lives, phone forward, and then take him home to the farmhouse where his mother is waiting to clean up his wounds.

This story has all the features of Jesus’ original tale: someone in distress, respectable passers-by ignoring his plight, a compassionate intervention from a usually despised or feared outsider, and someone to help restore the victim to health. 

It’s not an easy story to hear, because it plays on our prejudices and presumptions.  We find ourselves in it, either in the characters, or in our reaction to them, and we may feel uncomfortable about where it places us. It may challenge our cosy view of ourselves, and it may suggest that we have some work to do over the judgements we make about others. 

The saviours in the quad bike tale are those who, if I saw them, I might suspect are sheep rustlers or even, God forbid, that new catch-all phrase for anyone we disapprove of: terrorists. Why didn’t I think they might just be workmates going about their daily tasks? And the young man in that story, why was my first instinct to judge him for his reckless driving rather than let my heart go out to him, to help?

So, the parable ‘parables’ us – it becomes a tale about ourselves. Jesus uses parables like this not to condemn us for thinking ill of others: but to motivate us to cultivate love, even for those we fear or dislike. Jesus does this not to make us feel guilty about those times we’ve failed to act out of compassion: but to help us to be better prepared to be compassionate. 

The parable invites the questions: Do I love people? And if so, then how much do I love people? Are there limits on my compassion? When I think of ‘my neighbour’, does that  include the outsider, the one I do not know, or trust, or even like? And what do I do to show compassion – in other words, how do I love people? [2]

In our time, where there is a world shortage of compassion, Jesus longs for us to go against the grain, and lavish compassion on others. 

The power in the parables is that they are stories drawn from real life. If this story is a parable then how do I love the people within it?

Her neighbours in the flat upstairs heard the shouts and thuds and screams, the door slamming and her crying, and the crying of her daughter, below them, night by night; but, reluctant to get involved, they boiled the kettle again and turned the sound up on their TV. The other mums at the school gate saw the bruises on her arms and neck, but talked to her only about the next school trip, then, once she’d gone, started to speculate how she’d got to look like that. It was Marta, the Latvian Big Issue seller she always spoke to outside the Post Office, who took her hand, gently drew up her sleeve, and said, “I think I know what he’s doing to you… it happened to me also.” And, long story short, Marta helped her and her daughter find a place in the same safe hostel which had been her first place of rescue when she left her violent home.

Every story we hear day by day we might treat as a parable. So, in this story, how do I love the people within it? How do I love the woman and daughter victims of domestic violence? How do I show compassion for the frightened upstairs neighbours and the school gate mums? How do I love Marta, and the staff who run the safe hostel, and even, can I find compassion for the violent man behind all this? 

May God help us to be better prepared to be compassionate. For every story drawn from real life invites us to love: without fear or favour.

Notes

[1] Jeff Krantz, quoted in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary: Reflections, Proper 10c. Krantz discusses “compassionate conservatism” which “is portrayed as charitable acts of kindness within firm boundaries. Herein lies the problem. Because it is both compassionate and conservative, it has set limits on its goodness, it goes this far and no farther.”

[2] John Davies, Matt 22 – How do you love people? preached in Croxteth, 16 October 2005, and drawn from a question by Pip Wilson: “…I feel…” pipwilson.com, 9 October 2005.

Galatians 6.1–16, Luke 10.1-20

The Third Sunday after Trinity, 6 July 2025, Eldroth, Clapham

‘Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you.’

Today’s passage from the gospel of Luke is a rare insight into the activity of those first followers of  Jesus, his commissioning them to do some work for him. Not a passive audience to Jesus’ sermons, nor a faceless crowd of eyewitnesses to his healing miracles, here Jesus’ followers are people given agency by Jesus, who entrusts seventy of them with the task of taking his message out into the community, to show the public that “The kingdom of God has come near to you,” as he put it. 

His confidence in them empowers them to speak in his name, and to heal the sick. When they return to him, Luke reports, they return with joy, saying, ‘Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!’ They have found that the power of God is more than sufficient to overcome the darker spirits that are harming their community.  

Their task, however, is simple. Couldn’t be simpler. It is: to knock on doors, and to deliver the message: “Peace to this house!” 

Now, I know that not everyone here would see that as a simple task. We’re not Jehovahs Witnesses, we’re village Anglicans, and it’s not in our tradition to be door-knocking. Some of us may shy away from the idea. But step back a bit to consider, there’s still a lot of dropping-by and popping-in going on in our neighbourhoods, as there always has been, in our society and in every other one, including first-century Palestine. How would those who Jesus sent out into the villages decide which doors to call on? Probably they’d start with the doors of friends and neighbours, people more likely to welcome their greeting of ‘peace’ with the first-century Palestine equivalent of an offer of a cup of tea around the kitchen table.

And as we know, it’s often around the kitchen table when conversations move through trivia into deeper concerns, when laughter joins with tears, as hopes and dreams and problems are shared. That’s when people’s hurts come out that can be healed; that’s where people’s fears and anxieties, let’s call them their demons, can be exorcised, through words of kindness and shared wisdom. And so we can imagine that’s how things went for Jesus’ seventy house-callers, and how, following their first positive encounters, they’d have gained the confidence to begin to knock on the doors of strangers to offer a pair of friendly listening ears to them also. 

“Peace to this house!” – what a beautiful greeting, what a generous intention, in first-century Palestine and in every society since. People long to open their doors to the prospect of peace.

For we can be certain that within the walls of every dwelling, peace is something needed, wanted, yearned-for:

• peace as a place of calm is a longing of those young parents whose love for their newborn is tempered by the crying of seemingly endless sleepless nights; or in later years, by their offsprings’ ceaseless demands for their attention and care.
• peace as a state of mind eludes the anxious wage-earners in each home, feeling the squeeze of taxation and inflation, worrying about putting food on the table, balancing the books; fearing losing house and home;
• peace as a way of life is the hope of those in troubled relationships: it’s interesting to note that the expression “peace to your house” originates way back in the Book of Samuel, in a visit of David to the home of Nabal and Abigail. She is described as “an intelligent and beautiful woman”, but her husband was said to be “surly and mean in his dealings” with her and others.  By the end of her tale Abigail found a way out of this trouble; and there was peace in her house. [1]

We know also that what happens outside our homes impacts on our sense of peace. We live in a troubled world and it affects our state of heart and mind. 

The first-century Palestinians lived under the rule of the Roman occupying forces, with their exploitative tax system that transferred wealth from subsistence farmers and labourers to the elite in Jerusalem, who lived off the surplus. [2] 

Today we watch events in occupied Palestine with a combination of horror and helplessness: witnessing before our very eyes the destruction of a people, feeling impotent to stop this, or fearful of intimidation or punishment if we are heard to be calling for ‘peace’ in that place. [3]

But the take-away from this passage of scripture is that Jesus trusts his followers to be messengers of peace, who will find our desire to help bring healing to the broken world already being fulfilled, through our simple words of friendship, our empathy and our listening. “If anyone shares in the peace you offer, your peace will rest on that person;” he says. And if it’s not reciprocated, if your attempts at peacemaking are criticised, scandalised, even punished, even then, it will not be lost, he says: the peace you have in your heart “will return to you.”

We long for peace in the house of God – the church, which is still riven with disputes over the same subjects as of old: not least sexual politics, as demonstrated in the words of Paul to the Galatians which we heard today, in which he presses his argument that the Jerusalem church is wrong to limit the membership of the church to those who are circumcised.

We long for peace in the house of nature – the Vatican announced this week the publication of a ‘Mass for The Care of Creation’, a new form of worship which will enable all Catholics together to lament the damage which humankind has done to the earth and our fellow-creatures, to repent and pray for God to help us shape a new way forward. [4]

We long for peace in the house of the nations – the peoples of the world and their leaders, particularly those embroiled in war and other forms of conflict.

We long for peace in the house of the poor, the outcast, and indeed, to those who have no house, no door.

Our faith invites us not to give in to hopelessness, but to live in hope. “Every good thing that ever happens, Happens from the inside out.” It starts in our hearts and extends outwards to the world. [5]

Our Lord invites us, as he did those first followers of his, to make this simple prayer our own: “Peace to this house!” – to make it our prayer for our world; our prayer for every home we visit; our prayer, indeed, for our own homes and families, and the home which is within our heart.

I’m now going to play a song which I love. Sung beautifully by Jessie Buckley, it is a kind of domestic prayer by a mother for her household; but we can equally receive it as a prayer for the household of the world to which we all belong. It’s called ‘Peace in this House’. Take a moment, whilst this song plays, to consider how you might make this your prayer today: May there be peace in this house.

Hey kids, turn off the TV

No, I don’t wanna watch the evening news

So come on over here and sit down next to me

And let your momma look at you and you and you

And your beautiful faces

That I wanna keep safe as

Long as I can, I’m telling you right now

 

There’s gonna be peace in this house

There’s gonna be peace in this house

Gonna be some tender talkin’ and some sweet little nothings

That add up to the somethings we can live without

There’s gonna be peace in this house

Some belief in this house

 

And every good thing that ever happens

Happens from the inside out, I’m telling you now

There’s gonna be peace in this house

Did I tell you today that I love you?

You’re the reason for everything I do

And sometimes I think the only hope for this world

Is my love in you, and you and you

 

So let’s all be patient, let’s all play nice

‘Cause everybody’s gonna get

Get a little slice of this pie

There’s gonna be peace in this house

There’s gonna be peace in this house

Gonna be some tender talkin’ and some sweet little nothings

That add up to the somethings we can live without

There’s gonna be peace in this house

Some belief in this house

 

And every good thing that ever happens

Happens from the inside out, I’m telling you now

There’s gonna be peace in this house

Every good thing that ever happens

Happens from the inside out, I’m telling you now

There’s gonna be peace…

 

Songwriters: Angela Kaset / Doug Gill

Performed by Jessie Buckley from Wild Rose (Official Motion Picture Soundtrack), 2019

 

Notes

[1] 1 Samuel 25.6, New King James Version (NKJV):  “And thus you shall say to him who lives in prosperity: ‘Peace be to you, peace to your house, and peace to all that you have!”

[2] More context in John Davies, The odd embrace of Peter and Paul: a hopeful unity. Preached 29 June 2025.

[3] Imogen James, Ellie Price, Palestine Action group to be banned, home secretary confirms. BBC News, 23 June 2025.

[4] Holy See Press Office, Notice of Press Conferences, 30.06.2025.

[5] Line from Peace in this House, composed by Angela Kaset and Doug Gill, Performed by Jessie Buckley from Wild Rose (Official Motion Picture Soundtrack), 2019.