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Simeon had waited so long his bones had learnt winter. Dust in the folds of his cloak, incense caught in his beard, Rome at the gate, taxes like teeth, the poor bent double under empire. Still he came. Morning after morning to the place where promise thinned the air, where stone and heaven almost touched. Waiting for the consolation of Israel, for a God who would tear the sky open and come down. Not comfort as the world sells it. Not the soft lie that tells the bruised to mov

Yesterday my wonderful wife treated me to a guided tour of the Vatican Museums with an art historian. I am still carrying it round with me. The place is breathtaking. It really is. Marble and gold and pigment and centuries of prayer, power, fear, longing, all pressed into stone. You can feel the weight of history there. Human beings reaching for transcendence. Human beings reaching for power too. And perhaps those two have often been closer than we like to admit. What has sta

Lowered into Mercy- A True Story framed poetically They brought Yosef to Jesus because he could not come by himself. Four friends, backs bent beneath the weight of love, hands in the dust, shoulders learning the grammar of burden. Love is a verb. Costly. It carries. The house was full. Bodies pressed tight. No room at the door. No space for one more wound. So they climbed. Hands through clay. Fingers through timber. Tearing open the roof like grief tears open the heart. And t

It was Easter Sunday. Dawn had only just begun to lift itself over the city. Somewhere lilies were being carried into church. Somewhere a priest was lifting bread with tired hands. Somewhere someone who had slept rough was waking cold under a thin blanket in a church porch. And on the screens the old empire was speaking again. Open the fuckin’ strait, he says, you crazy bastards. On Easter morning. The day we dare to say that death does not get the final word. The day the wom

'Ed used to crouch
 outside Morrisons— not always asking, 
just hoping someone,
 tipsy from a night out, might drop a fiver
and not ask why. He said it was for food—
 but it wasn’t.
 Not really. The city’s full of street kitchens. What he needed
 was the bag of brown
 that quieted the ache
 that never really left.' Extract from Grace May yet Win, Rev' Jon Swales When Hope Shrinks For Ed, hope has become painfully small. Not small in importance, but small in reach. He is not t

Easter Sunday: The Wild Messiah Walks Among the Wounded Night does not leave all at once. It lingers on the streets, in hospital corridors, in the smoke that still hangs over cities at war. The world wakes bruised. Sirens somewhere far off. A helicopter circling above sleeping roofs. A man pulling a thin blanket tighter in the church porch. Empire still stands .Missiles still tear the dark apart. Children still wake to the sound of walls giving way. Mothers still wait for foo

Night gathers early. The room is dim. Bread on the table. Wine holding the last light. Outside, boots on stone. Empire still turns. Now too: Propellers in the dark. A drone circling above sleeping roofs. The long whistle of a bomb. Glass becoming rain. A child waking into fire. Inside, a bowl of water. He stands, slips off his robe, and takes up a towel. No one speaks. The one we call Lord kneels. Hands in water. Water on skin. Dust giving way. This is where kingdom begins. N

It looks alive. Leaves out, green enough to signal blessing. God on our side, favour resting, certainty thick in the air. From a distance it all looks like it’s working. A people fluent in Scripture, a faith wrapped tight around a nation, prayers spoken with the confidence of power. Chosen, they say. But chosen for what? There was once a promise; blessed to be a blessing, a light for the nations, a people through whom the world might taste what God is like. Not where blessing

She moved like silence in a room full of eyes, broke the jar like a prophet breaks the sky. No words, just oil — and the scent of burial. The men coughed, like they'd inhaled scandal. She poured a year's wage on his worn feet, and wiped them with her dignity undone. And the church— still, at times, finds itself in the crucible of pain and suffering. There, it pours itself out— in hostels and prisons, war zones and refugee camps, where the broken bodies of the world become its

Before It Ends in Blood He doesn’t come waving a flag. No anthem, no polished speech about strength, no promise that God will make us win. He comes weeping. Not abstract grief— but the kind that catches in the throat when you can already see the bodies. Jesus the God-Man looks at the city and sees its ending: stones torn down, smoke in the lungs of the poor, mothers learning the language of loss. “If only you knew what makes for peace…” But they don’t. Because peace that does

There were two ways into the city. Two winds moving through the same streets. Two gospels already being believed. From the West—empire. Boots on stone. Iron catching light. Horses restless for violence, their bodies remembering what they were trained to do. Standards lifted—bright, unquestioned. Carried like certainty. A kingdom fluent in power, calling it peace. A kingdom drenched in blood, calling it righteousness. A kingdom that names God without fear of God. Church—be car

Last night, I spoke online with thirty 17- and 18-year-olds, sharing a talk about compassion and calling. At one point, I stopped mid-sentence. What I had planned to say suddenly felt too neat, too rehearsed for the weight of the moment. So I tried to say something more honest. This is an attempt to do that more fully. I was born in 1977 and raised in a conservative evangelical church. From early on, we were given a clear vision of discipleship—costly, purposeful, and directe

Philip said, 'Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.' Jesus answered, 'Have I been with you this long? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father' ------ Tony is from Middlesbrough. You can hear it in the accent. Kindly. Friendly. Geordie-ish— but not quite. He’s been around church for a while now. Not the tidy kind of belonging— not the polished testimony version. More the kind where you drift in near the end for the cuppa and a custard cream, & stay close

In a previous reflection (see comments for the link) I wrote about emotional harm and the disorientation that followed it — how trauma can fracture the frameworks through which we understand the world, and how healing often comes slowly through time, prayer, and the quiet presence of safe people. There is another dimension of that experience I want to name. Justice. Or perhaps more truthfully: the restless need for it. Trauma scholars have noticed something about survivors. P

How long, O Lord, while cities burn? How long while the earth is lowered into graves? Your disciples once said, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” It is not hard to imagine asking the same. That instinct sits close to the surface — the desire to answer violence with something stronger, to call it justice, to feel certain we are right. You turned and rebuked them. And later, in a garden heavy with fear, you said, “Put your sword back in its p

There is a place for celebration. You feel it when the doors open. Music already rising, hands lifted, voices gathering strength together like fire running through dry grass. People arrive shaking rain from their coats, umbrellas stacked in the corner, latecomers slipping quietly along the rows, someone laughing too loudly near the doors. The room fills with the confidence of people who know how the story ends. God reigns. All will be well. The songs move easily in that direc

Word count: ~3,300 Estimated reading time: 16 minutes This essay is based on a talk given at St John’s Waterloo on 7 March 2026. ⸻ I am an Anglican priest in Leeds. I lead a community called Lighthouse — a church and charity for adults with multiple and complex needs, or as we often say, a family for those battered and bruised by the storms of life. Around 150 people call Lighthouse their church. It is a community of deep joy, fierce friendship, and stubborn belonging, but al

“We need a theology of revolt,” says Greg Boyd. He is right. But if the word revolt is to be more than noise—if it is to be faithful, liveable, and genuinely good news—then it must be shaped not only by urgency, but by mercy. Because the truth is this: many are not standing on the barricades. Many are barely standing at all. And still, the call of the kingdom remains. A theology of revolt does not begin with what the church must do, but with what God is already doing—and the

I want to speak honestly, but not noisily, about emotional and psychological harm. Not to rehearse details. Not to settle scores. But to name something real. I keep returning to Walter Brueggemann’s language of orientation and disorientation. There are seasons of life where things more or less make sense. Where the ground holds. Where the world feels coherent enough to live in without constantly questioning it. And then something happens that pulls the ground away. Disorienta