Fr Luke Miller

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...

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...

Fr George Congreve SSJE was a great spiritual writer. I hope my study of his thought and writings will appear next year. This is from an essay written in South Africa on The Incarnation of Our Lord . By a Divine act God has raised creation up to a new relation to Himself for ever It is not that the Christian poets have struck a new vein of joy in a higher and more hopeful way of looking upon nature and man's destiny, which is expressed in the story of Bethlehem: but that by a Divine act God has raised creation up to a new relation to Himself for ever. Fallen man had always an obscure fellowship with nature in sorrow and desire; but by the Incarnation their fellowship is advanced to the joy of an immeasurable hope, and of praise which cannot be expressed. For on a certain day the Eternal Son of God took His place in creation and became the Head over all things, in order to sum up the created universe in Himself, and present it to the Father, raised to the height of the Divine pur...