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Back to School Preaching from Year C, August to October 2025
In the past week or so leading up to writing this, I have heard the cliched phrase ‘every day’s a school day’ said a least half a dozen times. The sermons in the following pages cover the end of the summer holiday period, support the launch of a new academic year, and move into the autumn. There is a lot of learning going on ‘on the way’ to Jerusalem with Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, and related passages. The learning is often surprising, for example in the parable of the dishonest manager.
A common thread in these readings and in the sermons is transforming relationships with others and revisiting assumptions about what God cares about. Those who are criticised most are those who do not pay heed to the experiences of others, like the rich man who ignores Lazarus or the Pharisee who considers himself superior to the tax collector. Sermons like Chris Thomas’s (7 September) and Tim Weatherstone’s (for Harvest) remind us in different ways how important it is to focus attention on the experiences of others and learn from them by coming closer to our fellow human beings. The watchfulness and vigilance encouraged by Jesus, mentioned in Svetlana Khobnya’s sermon on Luke 12 (10 August), contrasts with the echo chamber being indwelt by the Pharisee who prays to himself oblivious of God’s perspective on the other stood nearby – see Adrian Cassidy’s sermon (25 October).
It seems true that those aged 11-30, for whom social media is ubiquitous, have accentuated our collective vanity and vacuousness by highlighting the effort spent by many of us ‘curating ourselves’ for an online audience (see Sarah Mortimer’s sermon on the dishonest manager, 21 September). However, Generation Z place a high value on mutual understanding between those who are in charge and those who are expected to follow. Their conscious opting out of insidious forms of power and political control, from which they are largely excluded, is further amplified in their successors, Generation Alpha.
Respect no longer comes with deference for many in the emerging generations who work with a different set of assumptions about what determines credibility. They are watching and learning; they are attentive to who is really caring for others and who is feathering their own nest. In this way, they are perhaps closer to the kingdom of God revealed by Luke’s Jesus.
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