Transgendering God
Salvator Mundi, by Leonardo da Vinci, 1499-1510 'The language of God as creator is a reflection God’s own gender diversity. The logos is...
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God's Midwives
"The significance of God bringing life where it has no right to be, is that God does this, not us. What if we aren’t ‘God’s fixers’ after...
The Gift of Hope - A Sermon for Advent 1, 2020
"As we work for the welfare of the city to which we have been sent in exile, we discover the capacity to love, to hope, and to embody...
An Incompetent Messiah?
'In Christ God draws alongside us; in Jesus God moves into our neighbourhood, meeting us in our failure, our sin, and our incompetence;...
The Hope of New Life - Christmas Day Sermon 2020
"For all the familiarity we have with the Nativity story, a lot of people miss an aspect of its significance that gives us hope in our...
Light in the Darkness
Isaiah 9.6-7; 61.1-11 Listen to this sermon here: https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/light-in-the-darkness This week, we are bringing to...
Hope in the Face of Despair
'As we await the birth of Christ, the coming God to humanity, we wait in solidarity with exiles, in unity with those who suffer and...
Resistance is Never Futile
"The ideologies of consumerism and militarism are insidious, violent, and all-embracing; and we are called to resist, to live out in our...
Is a Virgin Birth Inconceivable?
"We are invited to allow Mary to interpret the significance of her own child to us, rather than simply allowing the voices of men to...
Big Queer Carols, Sermon, 2017
A sermon by Andy Fitchet, for the Big Queer Carol Service 2017
A Missing Nativity
"The wild beasts and angels in the wilderness with Jesus and Satan give us an insight into the nature of Jesus’ ministry as it will...
From Priesthood to Prophecy
Domenico Ghirlandaio's fresco Zechariah Writes Down the Name of His Son (1490, fresco in the Tornabuoni Chapel, Florence) "The move from...
Bypassing Herod
At our Carol Celebration on Friday (the day the election result was announced) Simon gave a short sermon on Herod: "We, too, live in a...
A Right Jeremiah!
“Within the Christian story, the hope of Jeremiah and Isaiah is fulfilled in Jesus, who embodies God’s righteousness and justice,...
The World Turned Upside Down
"The comfort proclaimed by Isaiah to the exiles in Babylon was no shallow Pollyanna-ish message of hope. Rather, it was a comfort based...
Listening to the women
Revd Dr Simon Woodman, preaching at the Bloomsbury Carol Celebration 2018 "Mary, the teenage mother, gives voice to a dream of social...
The Massacre of the Innocents
"Matthew places God in his story in the person of the baby Jesus, a human at risk, on the run, helpless, innocent. This is deep theology,...
The Way of Wisdom
“There are few things I find more distressing than a Christian who believes they have only knowledge left to learn. You know the kind of...
‘Look up, and pay attention!’
"All of us who identify as people of faith - whatever faith group we belong to - encounter a system within society that tries to make us...
'Full of Grace and Truth' - Christmas Day Sermon 2017
John 1:14-17 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of...
Failed fantasy
'We are released from the fantasy that that we have to rescue ourselves, make ourselves good enough, even when we know (albeit we never...
Angels....
We get sent all over the place; we get sent to all kinds of people; we get sent to say all kinds of things....but whatever else we say,...
The angels and the shepherds
It sounds very romantic and cosy, when I hear people talk about; watching over our flocks in the fields by night and all that. But, as I...
The Prologue From John's Gospel
Read by The Revd Dr Simon Woodman Bloomsbury Carol Celebration 2017
Mary's angel
It was fine for Zecheriah - he may have lost his voice, but at least he was married, he was respectable, he knew what was going on, and...
Light in the Darkness
Speed-drawing of 'Light in the Darkness', a meditation on the prologue to John's Gospel; accompanied by the Bloomsbury Chamber Choir...
Zechariah's story
I had so looked forward to my week in the Temple. It only came round occasionally - there are so many of us with the right to serve at...
Creation in Advent
Many ancient Jews believed that God looked like their kings, and so they described God in terms of having a heavenly court, and sitting...
The Wise Men
"We need saving from the compulsions that determine who we are when we are acting unreflectingly; or distort who we are, even when it’s...
Spiritual Successors
"God moves in the mundane, and the small things… and I think about all the stuff you do – the ripples, and the stories, and the line of...
Jesus the Thief
"This is how Jesus came, it is how he still comes, and it is how he will come again, and again, and again. The light of the world comes...
Keeping the Rumour of God Alive
"Maybe the task before each of us is that of ‘keeping the rumour of God alive’, where the power of words is used to keep alive the story...
Peace at Christmas?
"The claim that Jesus is the true king of the earth presents a direct challenge to all other earthly claims to power. If we think of the...
'Good News' story, or good 'News Story'?
Take the news of a royal wedding, or the announcement of the expectation of yet another royal baby; both topics which have dominated our...
Christmas Day Sermon, 2014
"This is a messiah for all people, not just for powerful men. He is a messiah for those whom society devalues, a messiah for shepherds...
Waiting with Mary
"For Mary, this teenage mother the call of God on her life was far from straightforward! The signs of promise were there but they were...
Leaving Herod Waiting
"We have too many deal-makers in positions of power who would do a deal with the devil himself if it ensured their ongoing appearance of...
God is the distilled essence of love made absolute
Reflection by Simon Woodman for Christmas Eve Midnight Communion Service, Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 2015. "God is love. But this...
Which God do you believe in? Christmas Day Sermon, 2016
"Part of the problem with speaking of belief in God, is that there are so many definitions of God that we are invited to believe in....
An Advent Baptism
On Sunday it was a privilege to welcome Sheikh Pervez to the waters of Baptism. You can hear his testimony here
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