14 June 2015 10.30 Sung Eucharist Second Sunday after Trinity Canon Robin Greenwood Ezekiel 17. 22-end; Mark 4. 26-34 Today’s reading from Ezekiel began with a familiar but arresting phrase, “Thus says the Lord”; the passage from Mark’s gospel twice has the call to attend: “Jesus also said”. It seems very like the phrase we…
07 June 2015 10.30 Sung Eucharist First Sunday after Trinity Revd Simon Cowling Genesis 3. 8-15; Mark 3. 20-end ‘Bob’s your uncle’. That was, supposedly, the response of the general public to the appointment in 1887 of Arthur Balfour as Chief Secretary of Ireland. It was the Prime Minister of the day, Lord Salisbury, who…
Editor’s note: Bishop John Flack, formerly Bishop of Huntingdon, is the son-in-law of the late Canon Maurice Slaughter, formerly Priest in Charge of Bolton Abbey, and the late Jean Slaughter. After the Eucharist at which this sermon was preached, Bishop Flack interred the ashes of Jean Slaughter in the Priory Tower alongside those of her…
The Rector Bolton Abbey Parish Magazine June 2015 Vive la différence ‘There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble. A clean sweep will be made.’ This was Winston Churchill’s summary of the agreement at the Potsdam Conference in 1945 that redrew the boundaries of Europe. Fourteen million German speaking civilians, who had…
17 May 2015 10.30 Sung Eucharist The Seventh Sunday of Easter Louis della-Porta Acts 1.15-17 & 21-end, John 17.6-19 Lord, may our hearts be open to receive your love, so may our minds be open to hear your word. Amen. Maybe like me, you sometimes struggle with prayer, asking; …how do I pray?…what do I…
10 May 2015 10.30 Sung Eucharist The Sixth Sunday of Easter Revd Simon Cowling Acts 10. 44 -end; John 15. 9-17 One afternoon last week Liz Higgins and Betty Nelmes, who coordinate our exemplary team of guides at the Priory, invited me to meet some children from Oak Field School in Nottingham who were visiting…
The Rector Bolton Abbey Parish Magazine May 2015 Joining the dots Last month a human tragedy was played out in excruciating detail on the TV news bulletins as some seven hundred would be migrants drowned following the capsizing of their boat in the Mediterranean. Pope Francis, with characteristic directness, got to the heart of the matter:…
03 May 2015 10.30 Sung Eucharist The Fifth Sunday of Easter Revd Simon Cowling Acts 8. 26-end; John 15. 1-8 ‘Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent’. This faintly risqué vignette from the early…
26 April 2015 10.30 Sung Eucharist The Fourth Sunday of Easter Revd Simon Cowling Acts 4. 5-12; John 10. 11-18 It’s very hard not to feel what Tony Blair once called ‘the hand of history’ in Bolton Priory. It’s a history that is both tangible, present in the stones around us; but a history that…
19 April 2015: Third Sunday of Easter 10.30 Sung Eucharist Louis della-Porta Acts 3. 12-19; Luke 24. 36b-48 May our hearts, Lord, be opened to receive your love, so may our minds be open to hear your word. Amen. This prayer is rooted in our gospel reading to-day; the disciples’ hearts were first opened to…