TWELFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 2016 LUKE 12:32-40
The cruise from Westminster Pier on the River Thames to the Tower of London only took half an hour, but the effects on me have lasted a lifetime. I must have been ten at the time of that school field trip. Although I lived only 30 miles from the capital, I had never been to the Tower. But I’d listened to my history teachers, I’d heard the stories of traitors and tortures, betrayals and beheadings, mayhem and murder. I looked over the side of boat into the unwashed face of Father Thames – the same brown water that condemned men and women stared forlornly at hundreds of years earlier, as they made that same journey I, in my schoolboy excitement, was making. We arrived at the Tower and in the way that hildren do, I gazed, transfixed at instruments of slow death, and instruments of fast, like the chopping block where Ann Boleyn bade farewell to her head, or should that be where she bade farewell to her body?

At the time, it was the gruesome stories and the bloody artefacts that caused me the most fascination. Of course, they did. I was ten. But there were other exhibits at the Tower that were less enthralling to a young boy, but which the teachers seemed quite keen to expose us to. They led us through a doorway and into some heavily guarded rooms. At each entrance there stood uniformed men looking austere and threatening. And there, in the center of each room, were glass display cases. Boring glass display cases. No iron maidens, thumbscrews, or other Tudor torture devices. No graphic drawings of people being hanged, drawn and quartered, or having burning coals placed on their chests, or experiencing their entrails being eaten by rats while still alive. In fact, nothing to laugh at all. Just glass display cases. Containing stones. Stones and hats. Stones and rods. Stones and crosses. Still, these stones and hats seemed to get the
teachers quite excited. They were not your average, backyard stones, of course. These stones sparkled; they winked at you as you passed. They were transparent and pure; captivating - if you’re into sparkly stones. We weren’t allowed to get too close to them, not that we wished to. Some lad touched a glass case and one of the uniformed men appeared in an instant and rebuked him. It did the trick, probably because this was the Tower of London after all, where, no doubt over the centuries untold numbers of boys had been executed for touching the glass cases.

When I returned to the Tower, over thirty years later, the stones and hats were still there, untouched in the three decades since the first time I’d seen them. By now, though, my interest in the Crown Jewels had grown, and my time in the Jewel House was far more intriguing to me than it had been in my youth.

I guess as you grow your idea of.... (Read the full sermon here: What's in your wallet? )