Short Talks
This section of the website comprises short stand-alone talks and articles on different aspects of the Christian Faith, including the teaching of Jesus, the seasons of the Church’s Year and Feasts and Festivals. More talks/sermons/homilies/articles will be added in due course.
The section of the website entitled The Christian Faith provides more extended teaching on larger content areas, such as the Creed and the Sacraments.
St Peter's Chains
“While Peter was kept in prison, the church prayed fervently to God for him” (NRSV, Acts 12:5)
The New Testament reading for the Feast of St Peter and St Paul is the account in the Acts of the Apostles of St Peter’s miraculous release from the dungeon into which King Herod Agrippa had had him flung. The incident itself has also its own feast day, that of St Peter’s Chains on 01 August. A number of Anglican churches are dedicated to St Peter ad Vincula – St Peter in Chains.
Miracles
This section in the Holy Faith website includes short talks related to signs or miracles. Now available are: Blind Bartimaeus, Deaf man with speech impediment: Be opened, Feeding the 5000: Rest and refreshment, Jairus’s daughter: “Only believe”, the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter, Ten lepers: the leper's return, the Marriage Feast at Cana: Up to the brim, the Widow's son at Nain and the Gerasene demoniac.
Deaf man with speech impediment: Be opened
Jesus “said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened’“ (NRSV, Mark 7:34)
The healing of the deaf man who had a speech impediment is remarkable in that it showed that Jesus was concerned wholly with the deaf man as a person. He took him aside from the crowd as an individual. He indicated to him his purpose in so doing by putting his fingers into the man’s ears, and touching his tongue with saliva which was popularly supposed to have curative properties. He looked up to heaven to show that the cure would be the work of God and not a piece of magic. And then he addressed the man himself and said to him, “Be opened”, as though the man was in a locked room, shut off from the outside world. Thus Jesus made it plain that he was interested in the whole man, not just his organs of hearing and speech.