Where do I start? I think I spent the whole of the Pentecost weekend smiling away, all by God’s grace. It was a such a profound joy and memorable moment to stand in the magnificent Liverpool cathedral, to sing God’s praises together, to pray together, to unpick Holy Scripture and to raise our hearts to heaven knowing that God is the God of Love who calls us all into his service.
Thank you for the very many messages of welcome and support and for the assurance of prayers as I settle into this new ministry as your Bishop of Warrington. Thank you to everyone who helped me in the creation of the Welcome service and to everyone who took part in whatever way. The Scripture passages, the hymns and the anthems all have a deep resonance in my life over many years; to experience them all gathered into one spiritual moment was very moving.
Importantly for me and for Bishop Ruth, I am so grateful for the Act of Commitment and the Litany of Hope written by Fr Steven Shakespeare. I will read them often and pray the Litany of Hope regularly. Thank you for joining in with those hopes and prayers. I encourage you to use the Litany of Hope regularly as together we live and tell the story of Jesus.
I am struck by these words from Psalm 133 in Morning Prayer today:
‘Behold how good and pleasant it is to dwell together in unity.’
May we work together sharing the Gospel of Good News confidently, celebrating the great gifts of humanity, seek peace always, being kind, gentle and compassion to all who meet on this pilgrimage of life.
Please pray for me, as I pray for you
Bishop Simon’s Sermon
Welcome service for the Bishop of Warrington Saturday May 23rd 2026
Liverpool cathedral 3:00pm
A sermon preached by the The Rt Revd Simon Robnosn, Bishop of Warrington
To Family, Friends old, Friends new and Friends yet to be made Thank you….a particular thank you to my fantastic mum Joyce, who is on the front row! You are always an encourager and I know you will lovingly ensure that ‘I never get above my station! To friends of old, a number of you are here, again thank you for your love, your prayers for your wisdom and at times your correction; to friends new and friends yet to be made…thank you for your wonderful welcome and for all that you do in the glorious name of Christ. This is a good, a great, and a holy place to find myself by God’s grace. Thank you to everyone who has helped create this service of welcome, especially Canon Myles and Stephen. This is a service of welcome yes, more importantly though we gather together to worship God and to join in with the eternal song of heaven. To that end I have chosen some, technical term: ‘stonkers’ of hymns, please give the heavenly choirs a run for their money and raise your hearts and hands to the great throne of Grace as we sing and pray.
As I stand before you, a servant of the Lord, I arrive with words that resonate deeply on my heart and connect my departure from Truro to my arrival here so may I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
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If you’re a church posting
prayers for peace and unity today
while my city bleeds in the street,
miss me with that softness you only wear when it costs you nothing.
Don’t dress avoidance up as holiness.
Don’t call silence “peacemaking.”
Don’t light a candle and think it substitutes for showing up.
Tonight an ICE agent took a photo of me next to my car, looked me in the eye and told me, “We’ll be seeing you soon.”
Not metaphor. Not hyperbole.
A threat dressed up in a badge and a paycheck.
Peace isn’t what you ask for
when the boot is already on someone’s neck.
Peace is what the powerful ask for
when they don’t want to be interrupted.
Unity isn’t neutral.
Unity that refuses to name violence is just loyalty to the ones holding the weapons.
Stop using scripture like chloroform.
Stop calling your fear “wisdom.”
Stop pretending Jesus was crucified
because he preached good vibes and personal growth.
You don’t get to quote scripture like a lullaby
while injustice stays wide awake.
You don’t get to ask God to “heal the land”
if you won’t even look at the wound.
There is a kind of peace that only exists
because it refuses to tell the truth. That peace is a lie.
And lies don’t grow anything worth saving.
The scriptures you love weren’t written to keep things calm. They were written to set things right.
And sometimes the most faithful thing you can do
is stop praying around the pain and start standing inside it.
If that makes you uncomfortable—good.
Growth always is.
These extraordinary words are from Matt Moberg chaplain of the National Basketball Association’s Minnesota Timberwolves. He issued them on the 26th of January 2026 amidst the activism of the peoples of Minnesota 2 days after Alex Pretti was shot on the 24th January and some 17 days after Renee Good was shot in the face by ICE leaving a wife and a child.
Walter Wink, biblical scholar, theologian and peace activist notable in the world of progressive Christianity was born in 1935, he died in 2012. He says this: ‘The dominant religion on the planet is not Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or Judaism, but the pervasive faith in violence.’
In 1962 Martin Luther King Jr said this: ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.’
And what of the valley of dry bones: In 2013, I and nearly 50 other priests stood in a literal field of dry bones, in the Podrinje Bone Identification Project in Tuzla, north-eastern Bosnia a place where the relatives of those who had been murdered in the massacres and genocide of Bosnia searched for bits of their husbands, their brothers and their sons. They had been murdered and then dismembered and buried in various locations to make both finding and identification as difficult as possible. There was a strong smell of stale death all around the building that emanated from the wrapped packets of human bones stacked up on shelves as if in some sort of bizarre supermarket. Next to me, on a surgeon’s table was a metal tray….on it, like a half-completed jigsaw were a handful of small bones set out very neatly. The more I looked, the more I realised that these were the bones of a small child, identified only by recent significant advances in DNA…not all the bones were there…..because not all the bones of that small child had been found. I have never known a feeling of sickness like I experienced standing there in shock and despair at the evil cruelty meted out on a small boy.
In Liverpool today some 29, 864 children live in poverty after housing costs, nearly 35% of children. How many of those children will be hungry tonight, tomorrow and the next day.
This is the world in which God works through Jesus, and through every one of us gathered here in this sacred place, whether we are a teacher, a police officer, a cleaner, a mayor, a politician, a priest, a deacon, a bishop or a lay leader or any other calling.
This is the world into which we and must walk into with the Light of Christ and the Love of God before us…to transform lives, communities and the whole world.
This is the world in which God expects us to live and tell the story of Jesus, in the bloody, messy, challenging, frightening and traumatic mess of our wounds, of the wounds of each other and of the wounds of humanity. We cannot avoid nor should we avoid this mess of our conflicted, tortured and flawed humanity, for it is in these places that we find our need of each other yes, but more importantly our need of redemption, of salvation, of Jesus Christ himself.
From the moment we are forced out unwillingly from our mother’s womb breathing in the dirty air of the world, we scream, we scream because of the imposed trauma of being shoved out from the comforting warmth of the fluid of the amniotic sac into a world of noise, dust, cold and confusion. Our first breathy cry is a cry for care, warmth and love.
Throughout our lives we continue to cry out for care, warmth and love and for Divine attention: God—-see me, God—-hear my prayers, God——save him, heal her, change this, bring down the despots, God save the planet.
When did you last acknowledge your utter reliance on God no matter how many degrees you have, or how good at chairing meetings you are, or how strategic you are, or how organised you are?
When did you last consider the state of your heart and strip away the skin-toned make-up you use to cover up your inner wounds, your vulnerability, your need of God to heal and comfort you?
When did you last fall on your knees and implore Jesus to set your heart on fire again because that fire fizzled out years ago because you are in the wrong job, or in the wrong place or it is so long ago that you even thought that God might use you that you have just given up accepting that your bones have dried out.
Perhaps you are someone sitting here today or wandering around whose life has always felt dried out, who has spent your life wondering ‘Is this it? ‘Does no one see me?’ ‘Does God see me?’ ‘Am I loved?’ To which the answer is yes you are loved, yes you are seen, by me and Bishop Ruth and the good people of God gathered here and yes you are most definitely seen by God. Perhaps you, those of you who feel invisible, who feel unheard, who feel scared, lonely and that you have no purpose, perhaps you might need to turn to the cross, to turn to Christ here, now, in this place for the first time. If that is you, don’t, please don’t leave this place, this moment, this life-offering life-changing moment without speaking to one of us…..we will pray with you for Jesus to bring you life.
‘Here I am Lord, for you called me’ ‘Speak Lord for you servant is listening’ are words for all time and for all people. These words are key to why we are here as we offer ourselves to the service of Almighty God, as we try to live out the Great Commission to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
The land of dry bones is not simply an ancient story in scripture, it is a truth of the world today. No matter how strong your faith, or how weak it is or confused or bewildered or stale…..even if you are clinging on by the tips of your fingers to your faith……we are the people called to stand in the valley of dry bones and to sing the story of hope, of joy, of a new world, of a better way, of the way of Jesus. We do this not just with those from our own tribe…but with sisters and brothers from the communities of which we are part and for which we are responsible. We do this in the power of the Holy Spirit remembering always the words of Jesus: ‘I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’ We forget this truth at our peril.
We live this life by the power that is the divine breath of God. Selina Stone in her brilliant book A Heavy Yoke: Theology, Power and Abuse in the Church, says this: ‘Power is breath, life and existence. It comes to us in the act of creation by God, the eternal life source, who gives rise to all possibilities. And even when as individuals we have given up our last breath, however we come to that moment, we continue to be held within the breath of God and experience ongoing power in the life to come. This power is not limited to our material existence, it cannot ultimately be taken from us.’
We stand here in this great and sacred House of God as do so many people day after day in their churches, chapels, chaplaincies and in their homes…..to worship, to be re-energised, revitalised and to be equipped to speak of him who died that all might live again, and we do so knowing that the words of the Lord spoken to Ezekiel are for us also: ‘I will put my spirit within you and you shall live.’ Not you might live but you shall live.
Then, courageously and prophetically we step into the world that cries out for care, warmth, for love and for Divine attention…….heavenly salve on the scorched deserts that were once lush oases of vegetation, soothing balm on the self-imposed wounds of the heroin addict, warming ointment for the bruises on the face and arms of the woman whose husband has beat her up again, filling food on the plate of the hungry child living in profound poverty.
We are called as God’s church to be prophetic, to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, to grieve in a society that practices denial and to express hope in a society that lives in despair; not my words but those of the prophet Walter Brugggemann
We will stand up and we will serve. ‘We will not simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself. Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak…..Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We do so, together, day in, day out, in the power of God, in the truth of the unfiltered Gospel of Jesus Christ, renewed by the Holy Spirit, with the Gospel on fire in our hearts: This is who we are, what we are and what we are called to do. We will not be complacent, we will not be indolent, we will not ignore, we will not be divided, nor knocked off course for we know that A Gospel that does not unsettle, a word of God that does not get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that does not touch the real sin of society in which it is being proclaimed—-well, what Gospel is that? Oscar Romero 1978
My final words go to the Christian columnist Rachel Held Evans who died far too young aged on 39 whilst in a medically induced coma:
‘The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget—-that what makes the Gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.’
Sisters and brothers, we have work to do: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Amen
