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Talks and sermons
Welcome to the index for Bishop Richard’s speeches, sermons and other talks. Just click the links below to find the full text of his spoken words, ancient and modern... 2010The new life of love – Address on Ash Wednesday, St Paul’s Cathedral, February 17th 2010. “At the heart of Lent, the sad springtime of our Christian year, is a pilgrimage to the new life of Easter. We deny fuel to the surface existence where the clamorous ego is located. We long for the desert to bloom and for our lives to be filled with the love that is God.”2009Speaking from and in the truth – Address at Pentecost, All Saints Margaret Street, London, May 31st 2009. “I was profoundly struck with the truth of one such prophecy from a Russian priest who had experienced the horror of Stalin’s gulag. ‘Believers will be able to speak on the radio,’ he prophesied in the early 1980s, when the experts were all saying that the Soviet Union was here to stay. Then he added, ‘but they will not know what to say’.”The earthquake of the resurrection – Sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral, Easter Day, April 12th 2009. “Being a Christian is not buying into a package of ideas about God; it is not signing up as a member of the churchy equivalent of the National Trust to preserve the memory of Jesus; it is immersing oneself in a new creation.”The implications of the financial crisis and the recession – Speech to General Synod on Thursday, 12 February 2009. “We have been working as a diocese to respond to the likelihood of 150,000 unemployed on our side of the Thames. I am particularly interested in the Time Banking scheme which enables recipients of benefits to become co-workers and givers in their turn.”2008There went out a decree... – Address at Christmas Midnight, St Paul’s Cathedral, December 25th 2008. “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. Mary and Joseph were summoned to Bethlehem to have their data captured. I only hope that Quirinius and his administration were better at looking after the results than some of our own public bodies.” Does the story speak to us? – Address at the Chapel Royal, Epiphany 2008. “We have found ways of increasing production and wealth. We could feed everyone in the world if we had the will, but for many people who have accumulated great possessions, there is a sense of emptiness and happiness is elusive.”2007Faith in our media – Address to The Theos Forum at St Bride’s, Fleet Street, 4 December 2007. “If Jesus were to come again we would not make the mistake of crucifying him, which led to such disastrous results last time. Instead we would banalise him; interview him on the Today programme; give him saturation coverage; ask him to speak out until everybody was sick and tired of him and we passed on to the next sensation.”The least of the bloggers – The Christian Bloggers Awards Ceremony, St Stephen Walbrook, the City of London, 21 September 2007. “I come here with proper humility as the least of the bloggers in the Kingdom...””Let it end here” – Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, Guard’s Chapel, London, August 2007. “She confessed to receiving a very great deal from some of those whose lives she touched. She said of John, a young Greek suffering from cystic fibrosis – “He showed no sign of anger, no trace of bitterness but touched us all with an aura of optimism and hope for the future such that I have never before encountered.” Back to the Future: Bishop Tait and the Mission to London – Lambeth Library, July 2007. “Is Christianity to be the only love that dare not tell its name? I am thinking of one church in my Diocese built in the last few years to blend in with a row of shops so successfully that even when you know its whereabouts in theory, you still miss the entrance which is as obscure as a secret doorway in Harry Potter.”God is missing and not missed – London’s Internet Church, St Stephen Walbrook, February 2007. “The great killers in 20th century Europe were the secular Messianic states, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia with their pseudo-scientistic visions of how to build a secular heaven on top of a vast graveyard. But still obstinately, despite most recent evidence, the orthodoxy of the lounge bar of the Pig and Whistle is that the worst wars in history have been religious wars.”2006Is Britain a Christian country? – St Paul’s Cathedral, February 2006. “The Christian culture of England will not be built by some kind of sales strategy and deft advertising campaigns – huge billboards with the message, ‘Don’t let worry kill you, let the church help’. It has to be grounded in the love of Jesus Christ himself. This land will be transformed by renewed confidence in Christian families and the discovery that freedom and fulfilment are to be found in following Jesus and his loving laws in our life.”London now, city of heaven and hell – Guildhall Art Gallery, January 2006. “I come from a highly argumentative tradition where cities are concerned. In the Bible, the founder of the first city is Cain the murderer. Babel is a declaration of independence from God, but the New Jerusalem, in the Book of Revelation at the open ending to the New Testament, is a place where God and humanity co-habit. The Bible may begin in a garden but it has its climax in a city...”2005The hidden God – The first of three Advent talks, St Botolph’s Bishopsgate, December 2005. “Despite the obituary notices, God’s death seems to have been announced prematurely. He is not only still with us in the experience of millions of believers even in Western Europe, but there are rumbles of the kind that precede a great storm or an earthquake...”The hidden God and the distress of the nations – The second of three Advent talks, St Botolph’s Bishopsgate, December 2005. “God is a mystery, not in the sense of a puzzle which will eventually yield to the little grey cells of some Hercule Poirot, or will be solved in the light of further information. The biblical God is literally unfathomable by the faculties that he has created. There is no getting behind him and the mystery embraces us...”The return of the hidden God – The third of three Advent talks, St Botolph’s Bishopsgate, December 2005. “What we call God is a mixture of infantile projections and deep wisdom – weeds and wheat growing together in the field of our own lives. This continues to the end and I believe that the picture of Jesus hanging between two thieves suggests that the final harvest is not for this life...”The martyrdom of Nicholas Ridley – The Tower of London, 4 November 2005. “Every modern church in the West was profoundly affected by the explosion of that super nova, the old Western Church. The events of the 16th century are still with us in the shape of the churches we know. Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church was in many important ways more thoroughly reformed than the Church of England...”Living wisely on God’s earth – St Mary Woolnoth, October 2005. “Stripping off the surface self, the self with which our ancestors covered themselves to hide from the living God in the Paradise Garden, to be in the state in which Jesus presented himself to the Father, progressively simplifying our lives and embracing in all humility our creatureliness, kissing as Francis did the leper – that is the hard way through the barrier of fear to the joy and liberation of which Francis sings...”2004From tribal diocese to world city – St Paul’s Cathedral, June 2005. “The orthodoxy of the lounge bar of the Pig and Whistle is that religion is a cause of conflict and that the worst wars in history have been religious wars. You do not have to be a secularist to see elements of truth in this prejudice. Jonathan Swift Dean of St Patrick’s lamented that too often we seem to have enough religion to hate one another but not enough religion to love one another...”2003Swinkers of the world unite! – Illustrated London News, December 2003. “The real god is the economy and each day there is a weird ritual of taking the temperature of god as the chant is intoned: ‘The Hang Sen is rising; the Dow Jones is falling but the Footsie is stable.’ The asceticism of so many modern office workers is very remarkable. Like ancient votaries we take our places before our screens and tune in like mediaeval monks going about the opus Dei...”2001Spiritual malnutrition – St Paul’s Cathedral, Christmas Day 2001. “Dominance has come to replace connectedness in our dealings with one another and with the good earth itself. Alas, since our true life flows from the source of Being, (as Psalm 100 says, ‘it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves’) the effect of operating from the shell of our personality is, in the end, exhaustion and a sense of absence. This we try to fill with hectic overactivity...”
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