Welcome to the great drama of Holy Week! This Sunday we embark upon a journey with Jesus. It is a dramatic journey from His triumphal entry…to His cross…to His empty tomb. Practically, for us, it is 5 services in 8 days—the most concentrated season of worship on the church calendar. I can recall earlier days in my Anglican journey, where I thought this was way too much. I tended to opt out of this or that service. Selectively attend. Certainly did not immerse myself in th

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily ple

On Sunday, I introduced everyone to the Quartet of Desire. There was a lot packed in that introduction, so I thought I would share again some of the key points here in a blog post. What is that Quartet? The Quartet of Desire is a set of four deadly sins that all have one thing in common : they are all disordered desires for fulfillment . The first three Deadly Sins we treated—Pride, Sloth and Anger—are less oriented towards fulfilling our desires. They

With some Special Thoughts about Gossip…and a Postscript about the Manifold Irritations of Our Age “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.” Ephesians 4:26 St Paul’s admonition to the Ephesians 'to be angry but do not sin' rests on a crucial distinction between righteous and unrighteous anger. We are all well-acquainted with the fact that one man’s righteous anger (so-called) often appears to others as unrighteous. We are easily ca