John Davies: Notes from a small vicar

The woman laden with Christmas shopping bags knows it; the alcoholic wit hate one remaining friend knows it; the athletic woman recovering from her car crash knows it: the hard-won hope in Isaiah's words, " Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, 'Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come ... and save you.’ " A talk for The T...

As the worldwide church sings, ‘On Jordan’s banks the Baptist’s cry announces that the Lord is nigh’, a reflection on whether reconciliation is possible today in the land of the River Jordan. A talk for The Second Sunday of Advent, 4 December 2022. Find the text to this and all my talks at bit.ly/johndavies-talks .

Why call Jesus a king when everything we know about his life demonstrates that he was the anti -king, a humble man with the least autocratic tendencies imaginable? It's an imperfect turn of phrase but the Lord of earth and heaven, the One we call our King, is the One through whom God ‘was pleased to reconcile to himself all things’... His kingdom of love, joy and peace is unlike any we’ve seen or...

Whatever our views on war and nonviolent action, the warriors and the peacemakers of old together call us to live faithfully, and in our own time of conflict to involve ourselves in doing what is right, being prepared to embrace both the trouble and the hope that this will bring. A talk for Remembrance Sunday, 13 November 2022. Find the text to this and all my talks at bit.ly/johndavies-talks .

The words of committal in the old Prayer Book Funeral Service seem to sum up well our usual state of being: ‘In the midst of life we are in death’, it says, and it seems we are, each of us people who are keenly affected by loss, continually bereaved. Yet Jesus quotes the book of Exodus where God tells Moses ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ - three people who Mo...

'Turning the other cheek’ and ‘giving up your coat as well’ - these are actions of defiance , rather than defeat in the face of a bully; these are actions of protest rather than passivity in the face of an oppressor. Today we honour those people who live lives of hope, who demonstrate what hope means in the face of challenge and hardship. A talk for The Last Sunday after Trinity, 30 October 2022....

The Parable of the Unjust Judge and the Persistent Widow teaches that when ordinary people exercise pester power then the world can become a better place. It's about prayer and protest and how, when people combine these two, the world changes .  A talk for The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, 16 October 2022. Find the text to this and all my talks at bit.ly/johndavies-talks .

The story of the one healed leper who returned - the foreigner of the group - a story which may encourage even those of us at our lowest ebb that it is nevertheless possible, with thankful hearts, to experience respair , to move from despair towards a place of hope. To make a faith journey forwards with Christ at our side, giving thanks to God. A talk for The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, 9 Oc...

Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, says Paul to Timothy. For there is treasure all around us if we look. Treasure in the people with whom we share our days; treasure in the creatures whose home is this precious earth; and treasure in the earth itself and all that grows and flourishes within. A talk for The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, 2 October 2022. Find the text to this and all my talk...

The Prodigal Manager, facing the sack for squandering his landowner boss's profits, asked himself, "What will I do now? I'm not strong enough to lift and I'm too proud to beg." It was a moment of desolation that became for him, an epiphany. For, realising that he had nothing to lose, he gambled on a plan which, if it worked, would make his chastened boss look good again and would make the poor ten...

The Bloated Man loved the idea of sacrifice : as long as that meant others making sacrifices which benefitted him.... But when we deal with hunger, food, and the earth as servants of the earth and its creatures, there is joy in service of this kind because when we serve the earth then the earth from its richness returns goodness to us. In the same way there is joy in serving others because in doin...

In the service station cafe we helped her find her cheap earring, and she told us it had been her best friend's, who had recently died last month. That's why it meant so much to her to find it again. This, for me, felt like what I’d call a ‘Kingdom of Heaven moment’. For it can feel like we’re never as close to glory as in those moments when we rediscover something precious we’ve lost, as when we...

Jesus was a hungry man in a land of hungry, anxious, angry people. Hunger isn’t much talked about, in scripture or in our own society, but when it stalks a people the signs are there. Today, in a land of hungry, anxious, angry people, how do we follow Jesus? A talk for The Twelfth Sunday after Trinity, Sea Sunday, 4 September 2022. Find the text to this and all my talks at bit.ly/johndavies-talks...

“Daddy, where do sailors go to church?” asked the young son of curate Revd John Ashley, who consequently turned down a parish appointment to begin a ministry to seafarers in the Bristol Channel. The worldwide Mission to Seafarers (supported on Sea Sunday), owes its existence to Ashley, who doubtless would have found opposition to Ashley’s idea of leaving conventional parish work at the start of hi...

Luke chapter 10 offers us a unique expression of the meaning of the cross. There, in verse 18, as nowhere else in scripture, Jesus describes his crucifixion experience. In just one brief, astonishing, line he projects himself forwards in time to tell us what he sees at the moment of his death: ‘I see Satan fall from heaven like lightning,’ he said. If you want a definitive description of the most...

How can we cultivate the desire to live by the Spirit so that our cravings for what other people want can fade and diminish? There’s a discipline involved. It might be that we determine to spend less time with those things which feed our desires to have what others desire - in other words to fast-forward through Claudia Winkeman’s shampoo adverts, or to stop reading the new car reviews in the week...

The story of Jesus’ exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac lands us directly into the territory of the deep spiritual forces at work in our world, forces which operate on the personal level and that of whole communities, institutions, and nations, and which interact in complex ways between all these. It invites us to consider our own spiritual condition, the spirituality of the place or places to which...

You may not think of yourself as a teacher: but you've got Wisdom about The Trinity. A talk for Trinity Sunday, 12 June 2022. Find the text to this and all my talks at bit.ly/johndavies-talks .

There is a line in a poem by R.S. Thomas which says, quite simply, that ‘wisdom must come on foot’. This makes me think of those few special moments in my life when I have been in the same place as The Queen, who has always insisted on walking among the crowds, and how I’ve seen her engaging people along her way, listening generously to each one she meets, offering such wise or comforting or encou...

A talk for the The Sixth Sunday of Easter, 22 May 2022. Being in the kingdom of God makes us ‘peacemakers’, creators of Shalom, with the immense power of Jesus at our disposal to play our part in transforming the world into a world of Shalom, wholeness, completeness . We can invite God into our life each day, with simple prayers such as ‘Peace on this house, peace to my neighbours, peace in my lif...

Janet Zirugo and Jessica Mwedzi struggle to put food on their families' tables in an area of Zimbabwe vulnerable to drought. ‘Women are at the mercy of climate change and hunger', Jessica says. Janet, Jessica, and the dry earth itself cannot be well if we are not well. And we are not well in this unequal world where the land, its creatures and its peoples are exploited and suffer for the gain of a...

Dorcas the seamstress, realising what a precious gift God has put into her hands, feel encouraged to use her precious skills to create generous practical gifts for others in need; Peter the fisherman, likewise draws on the courage to find the right way and the right moment to share God’s good news with others. And  God gives us all we need to be of help to others, each one according to the gi...

When Belfast Presbyterians Steve and Janice Stockman met Pope Francis in his Vatican library he told them that ‘The Christian faith is fundamentally about an encounter with Jesus Christ.’ When Saul encountered Jesus on the Damascus road, the scales which fell from his eyes were those illusions created by the false gods of religious and political ideology. His mission was no longer to serve religio...

Thomas, on seeing the change in his fellow-disciples and believing what they’d told him, didn’t doubt the resurrection. No, it was rather that Thomas still doubted the crucifixion . Thomas wanted evidence that Jesus had actually died that cruel death - he wanted to see his body wounds - because he was struggling to believe that the event had actually happened. His question was - could Jesus really...

If the events of Good Friday are universal (and they read like scenes from a contemporary war) then Mary’s encounter on the Sunday must also ‘happen every day’. Mary turns as she learns - from the teacher - that amid her grief she is awakening to an unexpected, radically new beginning. And from this we too may turn from our griefs and learn to find little resurrections happening every day. A talk...