Fr Luke Miller

A lovely evening tonight at the Pattenmakers ' Feast at the Mansion House. This was my sermon at S Margaret Pattens last year for Asension Day at which the Company celebrated the 300th anniversary of the granting of Livery . Ascenciones in Corde ‘Liftings up of the Heart.’ Shoes are a sign of the fall. As indeed are all clothes, but perhaps most clearly, shoes. Our shoes are the point at which we are connected to the ground, reminded that we are creatures of the Earth, unable to rise up above the dirt of the earth. Pattens were an attempt to lift us up over the grime of the streets; they tried to protect our fine shoes, and to keep our feet from becoming smelly – or too smelly. They are quite literally ‘little ascensions,’ raising us up, even if only a little way, above the sorrowful dirt.  The Ascension might at first seem to be an overly literal fable. A rounding off of the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus with him disappearing into the sky. If you g...

A sermon for the week of prayer for Christian Unity preached at the Tyburn Convent Blessed be the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ!  By His great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope 1 Peter 1:3 There is a fashion to say that the church was always divided. After all, we are told that there was from the beginning the argument between the Greek speaking and the Hebrew Christians. We are told the ecumenical project is therefore doomed, and we should be content with the divisions we know in the church – or at least leave their solution to the Parousia. But the Scripture itself will not let us do this. With the prayer of the Lord that we should all be one ringing in our ears we read the various descriptions of the unity of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles; and then there is the evidence of the First Letter of St Peter from which the short lesson at Vespers tonight comes. An Epistle of Unity The letter called 1 Peter seems to have bee...

The City New Year service at S Michael Cornhill  is attened by the Lord Mayor in full regalia. It is one of only a few times in the year that the Lord Mayor wears the ' Collar of Esses ', a livery collar which, though repaired and remade, goes back at least to the reign of Henry VIII. It is extrarodinary to contemplate the nearness of the past when such an item is in use. It gives connexion with out predecessors and is a tangible link with those who have gone before. Of course the thing is that human history is not that long. near the entrance to the British Museum is the ' Battlefield Palette ' about a century older than the Narmer Palette , which is the document with which written Egyptian history begins. It is about 5,000 years old. Not a very long time in the scheme of things. There has been a church on the site on Cornhill for a good proportion of that time, the first one having been built on the edge of the Forum of Roman London. The Battlefield Palette ...

Today I preached forthe Epiphany at S Mary's  Bourne Street . Poking about on their webiste I found an interesting reflection on the building, here . It mentions that there was a move to whitewas the red brick at one point, mercifully not followed through. Red Brick in Bourne Street It was Comper's building at S Cyprian's Clarence Gate which gave the impetus to this idea, and indeed Percy Dearmer had S Mary's Primrose Hill whitewashed in direct response to that building. the poit was that Comper was moving in a modernist direction, saying that the church has no other purpose than to be a container for the altar and reducing all else to the minimum. Whitewash in Primrose Hill I said something about all of this in a sermon for the dedication festival at S Cyprian's last year. Sermon S Cyprian Clarence Gate Dedication Festival 2017 Ps 122:1 Let us go to the house of the Lord Revelation 21.9-14; Psalm 122; Hebrews 12.18-24; Matthew 21.12-16   ...

The chalk on the Epiphany is one of those things that some people know very well, and others have never heard of at all. The wrting of the traditional names of the magi on the lintel of the door is a way of marking the home and offering a symbol of Christian hospitality. It is also a little act of witness. It even works if you have a double glazed front door rather than helpful brickwork as you can write the words on a paper and put it up inside the glass.