Fr Luke Miller

A Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Family Luke 2: 41-52   Luke 2:49   “ Why were you searching for me?”  he asked.  “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” Our Father who art in Heaven ; at the very beginning of our prayers is the language of the family. It is repeated all through scripture, and is characteristic of Christ’s teaching about God. He could have used the language Lordship, “you call me Master and Lord, and rightly so, for so I am.” ( John 13:13 ) But he preferred the titles of relationship and love: Son of Man; Son of God. He said that anyone who does the will of the Father is “my sister and mother and brother.” ( Matthew 12:46-50 ) The language of family relationships is used in Scripture to describe the profundities of our relationship with God: the church is the “bride of Christ” and Christ is her Head as the husband is the head of the household. ( Ephesians 5:25-33 ) Despite the failure of some fathers, and concern about ...

When He came into the World He said, “Behold I come to do your will.” Hebrews 10:5;7 Are we nearly there? Some homes are full of children brimming with excitement. Others are just jaded with weeks of anticipation. We have gone through Black Friday  and Cyber Monday and goodness knows what. Office Christmas parties and school plays and lunch club Christmas lunches all the other anticipations of Christmas make almost any assertion of the need to keep Advent seem out of touch at best, and at worst, so stubbornly insensitive most people’s experience that we are making ourselves irrelevant by hanging on to the purple and the restraint and saying ‘yes, we are nearly there, but we are not there yet.’ We are very nearly there: but not quite yet! The Christ Child is with us: His incarnation began when He took flesh in His mother’s womb. Nine months ago on Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation , 25 March we celebrated his coming to earth. Angels in Nazareth; the unexpecte...

It is a year today since it was announced that Bishop Sarah was to be the new Bishop of London. As we scurried through the passages under S Paul’s cathedral and to the Chapter House for the ‘reveal’ I was still working out what it would be like to work, as a traditionalist, with a Bishop whose sacramental ministry I cannot receive. I can say unequivocally that it has been good. At the time I posted here that I thought we could make it work and if we can make it work, we can bring a gift to the whole church. Nothing in the time since has given me any reason to change my mind on that. There has been much said about mutual flourishing in the Church of England and a determination to ensure that the hopes can be turned into reality. I think Bishop Sarah and I have demonstrated a little bit of what that reality might mean. The willingness of the Bishop to live and breathe her commitment to making everyone’s ministry flourish, including mine and that of other traditionalists and...

It must be a number of Christmases ago now when we were sitting round as a family and somebody, possibly one of my sons, asked my father-in-law about D Day. He’d been there on a merchant ship serving with the DEMS . Neither he nor my mother-in-law had ever really talked about those days and she suddenly interjected into the conversation. She had been a Wren , and she had realised that the plot on which she had been marking the ships must have included the one in which her future husband was serving. She realised she had been quite literally pushing him around. The D Day Plot at Southwick House (HMS Dryad) We’d sort of known that Nandad had been in the battle but Nannie’s role had been one of those hidden things, hidden courage. Christmas is a story of hidden courage. And that is particularly the case when we turn our minds to Mary. First she needed the courage, the courage shown by so many of you and your predecessors in the women’s Royal Naval service, to accept the call....

Uniformed youth organisations are on the up. It is well known that Scouts and Guides would grow bigger if only they could find more adult leaders. The Boys Brigad e and Girls Brigade have development officers seeking to increase the number of Companies, and the Sea Cadets for whom I am the London Area Chaplain are seeking to expand the number of Units. In recent years the reformed and reinvigorated police cadets have grown to 5000 members in the Metropolitan Police Area from a standing start. Army and Royal Air Force Cadets and the CCF are also popular. BB Evening making Christmas cards with a local artist  Younger BB at the Advent Activities making decorations for church Despite the idea that young people are all laid-back and messy, it seems that tens of thousands of them enjoy what look like thoroughly old-fashioned organisations. Why might this be and what can the church learn from it? Sea Cadets at the Lord Mayor's Show Great Activities...

The London Resilience Forum gathers together those who respond in London to major incidents. Chaired by Deputy Mayor of London, Dr Fiona Twycross and supported by the London Fire Brigade , London Resilience is a partnership comprising the emergency services, local government, the army and other responders such as the RNLI, Public Health England, and the Environment Agency. There are three 'sector panels' for the Business Sector, the Voluntary Sector, and the Faith Sector, which I chair. Last week the London Assembly's Resilience and Emergency Planning Committee took evidence about how the partnership works to enhance London's ability to cope with stresses. You can watch my evidence to the Committee from 1:06:45 Five years ago when I took the chair of the Faith Sector Panel the question was ' why is there a Vicar in the room ?' It is now recognised that the contribution of the Faith Communities to London's resilience is of huge importance and the qu...

A couple of weeks ago now my colleague the Acting Archdeacon organised a study day on estates ministry in the Two Cities. In his opening remarks he made the point that here in the centre of London our estates are "hidden". Both by deliberate acts of planning and also in that they are at the back of our minds. The font where I was baptised The Church of the Holy Spirit This set me thinking about my own engagement with ministry on estates, and indeed with living on estates. I was born on an estate, the Riddings Estate in Scunthorpe where my father was the first priest in charge of the then newly built Church of the Holy Spirit . I was baptised in a font made out of a piece of unworked iron ore underneath a spire formed of three steel girders made in the Appleby Frodingham Scunthorpe steel rolling mills. Then after a brief moment in which he served in a rural Lincolnshire parish while being the deputy youth officer for the diocese of Lincoln, we moved to Leeds where...

Reflection in S Stephen Walbrook at the launch of the Musicians' Church Website S Cecilia  was a martyr who had nothing specific to do with music. The story has it that she was a young girl who was to be married to a rich Roman who required her to adopt paganism. She refused, asserting her faith and that she was betrothed to Christ, and was sentenced to death. They put her in the hypocaust to suffocate her. It did not work, so her throat was cut. Following  Jesus Christ was and for so many is a matter of sacrifice, and the fine music of a S Cecilia Mass does not mask the fact that the feast celebrates the martyrdom of a young woman.  The antiphon for the opening of her mass used to run: As the organ played for her wedding, music sounded for her in heaven . Later the main school for church musicians in Rome was next to her church and she was their natural patron. From the act of witness of a young girl so much great good has come since she has inspired ...

With thanks to Fr Tim Handley of S James Garlickhythe who drew my attention to this passage from Jeremy Taylor.  [The Eucharist] is the greatest solemnity of prayer, the most powerful liturgy and means of impetration [fervent request], in this world. For when Christ' was consecrated on the cross, and became our high priest, having reconciled us to God by the death of the cross, he became infinitely gracious in the eyes of God, and was admitted to the celestial and eternal priesthood in heaven; where, in the virtue of the cross, he intercedes for us, and re-presents [ie makes present an eternal reality here and now. ] an eternal sacrifice in the heavens on our behalf. That he is a priest in heaven, appears in the large discourses and direct affirmatives of St. Paul. That there is no other sacrifice to be offered, but that on the cross, it is evident, because "he hath but once appeared in the end of the world to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself;" and, therefore,...

I preached this afternoon at Westminster Abbey. I never quite say what I have in the text in front of me, for a sermon is a living thing, open one prays to the Spirit even in the process of delivery. So, though  this was not quite what I said, this is the text I took with me.  The readings were: Job 13:13-14:6 and Hebrews 2:5-end A few months ago one of my sons was walking down the corridor in his regional university when a couple of lads and will up to him and asked him in the patois of the London gangs, “what is your Ns mate?” Having been brought up in North London he gave the right postcode and a sticky moment passed off safely. Part of the terrible attraction of the gangs which are causing so much grief and fear in so many parts of London is the search which is summed up in our text this evening: what is man that there are mindful of him? Young people search to know who they are and in a perverse way membership of the gang gives the security, structure and fami...