SPS Online

SPS Online is where the sermons of St Paul's Shadwell are collected, and they come with the room still in them. Before a speaker starts, someone often prays for them or reads the passage while it goes up on the screens. The congregation answers back. There are cheers and amens, and replies when a preacher asks the room 'Anyone?' and waits. Several speakers share the preaching, and a number of the sermons belong to series. Michael Traynor preaches in three of them. In the series on Isaiah's servant songs, he describes the book as having two halves: judgment and exile up to chapter 39, then a turn toward comfort at chapter 40. He argues that seasons of obscurity do not mean a lack of purpose, and he backs this up with his own history of three years training as a circus acrobat, nine hours a day, for performances that might last six minutes. In a series on Luke's parables, he stops before Luke 16 to explain why Jesus taught in parables at all, pointing to Matthew 13 and Mark 4. In another series, on the lives of Elijah and Elisha, he reads the story of Naaman, the army commander with leprosy, from 2 Kings 5. His delivery is full of asides, and he warns the room that his accent may sound more Scottish before it settles. Raff Chaves preaches from Colossians 2 on the cross. The sermon turns on Peter objecting to Jesus' death and the reply, 'Get behind me, Satan', and it keeps coming back to one phrase: with no debt there is no charge. It ends with a prayer for anyone who still feels condemned. Abie Hepworth takes Palm Sunday, the start of Holy Week, and sets the celebration of the triumphal entry aside to look at what comes before Easter. The subject is obedience, and how hard it becomes when the worry is what other people think, with passages from John 4 and John 8 holding Jesus up as the model. Brigid Beney starts by admitting she likes the idea of 'sermon' as a verb, then tells a story about ordering a new bed. Later she argues that God's delay is not cruelty or corruption, and describes biblical justice as God putting the world back together, with racism and sexism among the things that will not survive. Her sermon ends by pointing people to a prayer team under the galleries. What the feed offers is complete sermons tied to named chapters and verses, many told through the speaker's own experience, with a gathered church audible around them.