While it is yet day

Haddon Willmer

Gospel

  • Questions to ask when reading Luke’s parables 

    In a recent talk, Haddon points to a connection between Luke’s parables and Nathan’s parable in 2 Samuel 12. Luke’s stories are not like the puzzling parables which begin ‘the kingdom of heaven is like …’. They are more like Nathan’s parable in 2 Samuel 12. Nathan tells David a parable about a cruel rich…

  • Does Jesus call us to political discipleship?

    With a group from our church I listened to Edward Norman giving the Reith Lectures, and was increasingly disturbed. It was a time when many of us had been stirred by books like John V. Taylor’s Enough is enough, by Martin Luther King, and whispers of Liberation Theology, and we were children of the post-1945…

  • 4G Jesus: Galilee, Gethsemane, Golgotha and Global

    Transcript of a talk given at Moortown Baptist Church, 4th April 2023. You can listen to the talk here.  Introduction  I want this evening in this talk, to share the story of Jesus as I’ve come to know it, or at least part of it, and very imperfectly. You don’t have to agree with me.…

  • The Politics of Forgiveness

    Published in The Third Way, c.1979 There is, at present, a great and growing interest amongst Christians in this country in political matters. They feel responsible and concerned. This is a good development – a waking up to reality. But all that we do is not well: the man struggling out of deep sleep goes…

  • Sin drops us in it at the threshold of forgiveness

    1 Introduction:  This sketch is significant for me, since it is the first time I have got near to defining sin as what brings us to the threshold of forgiveness. That may not be a new idea altogether, but I can’t remember finding it plainly anywhere. Luther and Barth give me some encouragement in that direction, but…

  • ‘Team God’ – a word for Trinity Sunday

    The doctrine of the Trinity states that God is ‘One in three persons’, but that should not lead us to think there are three gods, or even three parts of God, operating independently from one another, for God is one in a most perfect unity. Nowhere in the New Testament, the earliest Christian witnesses we…

  • Power and the history of the Gospel in the church 

    This is the third of a three part series. You can read part one here and part two here. Friendship is not the only category we need to trace the history of the Gospel in the church. No doubt there are many other themes of heuristic utility to be explored. In this discussion, we will…

  • Friendship and the history of the Gospel in the church

    This forms the second of a three part series. You can read part one here. It is unlikely that a church, as a merely human company, will survive and grow so that it gets to the point of a fiftieth anniversary history, if it is unfriendly. The occurrence of friendship is an immense resource for…

  • Writing local church history

    John Briggs and I met as freshmen reading History at Cambridge nearly half a century ago. Now in our active retirements we have, besides our pensions, stores of experience to mull over. Perhaps we should give ourselves the leisure to do that – if mulling can be saved from being pointless self-indulgence. I think of…

  • The Good Shepherd

    Sermon preached on John 10.11-18 at Stainbeck United Reformed Church, 25 April 2021. The sermon can be watched here. John’s Gospel as a whole reflects on the life of Jesus, his words and his actions. John was like a man standing on a high hill, able to see the whole land laid out before him,…