This blog presents the homily written by Fr Robert Thompson, vicar of St Mary’s with All Souls’, Kilburn and St James’s and the Sherriff Centre, West Hampstead and due to be preached by him at the launch service for Together London on Thursday 22 January 2025. Unfortunately, the day before the service Robert had, as he put it, “a wee emergency medical procedure” and had to go to the Western Eye Hospital for an operation the next day.
Robert will need no introduction for many reading this but a brief account of his background is helpful for me, recognizing that he arrived in Kilburn from drama in Notting Hill where he was vicar of St Clement’s at the time of the Grenfell Tower fire and just two minutes away. St Clement was a major initial relief centre for the fire and days after the disaster, Robert delivered a sermon for the community in front of an army of news cameras and high-profile politicians. He sat as a Labour councilor in Conservative-controlled Kensington and Chelsea and was chair of the Grenfell Recovery Scrutiny Committee.
Robert succeeded Fr Andrew Foreshew-Cain who resigned in protest against the Church of England’s views on same-sex marriage, having been a campaigner for same-sex unions over more than 20 years at St James’s. On being appointed to St James’ in 2018 Robert “vowed to keep up the pressure on the Church of England to change its gay marriage policy.” Robert said he shared Andrew’s views and it is something he would continue to fight for inside the church, being gay himself, with a partner – but not married.
Together London is the London Diocese network of Together for the Church of England, formed in early 2024 and bringing together members of General Synod, a wider network of Church of England members and working with other partner organisations.
The launch service was a Eucharist of Full Inclusion on the Feast of Vincent of Saragossa, Deacon and Martyr.
Homily: “Jesus makes room”
(Mark 3:7–12; with 1 Sam 19:1–7; Ps 56; 1 Cor 12)
Tonight’s Gospel is so simple you can almost miss how radical it is.
Jesus doesn’t go to the centre. He goes to the lake.
He doesn’t gather the impressive. He gathers the hurting.
He doesn’t build a platform. He makes room.
Mark says, “a great multitude followed him.” And then he does something strange: he names where they come from: Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, beyond the Jordan, Tyre and Sidon. It’s geography, yes. But it’s also theology.
It’s Mark saying: Jesus is being approached by people from everywhere: people with different histories, different accents, different backgrounds, different bodies, different levels of safety, different relationships to religious respectability.
And they don’t come to Jesus to be tested.
They don’t come to be assessed.
They come because they need life.
Mark says they pressed in “to touch him”. Not because they were trying to disrupt worship, but because the world had already disrupted their lives. They came carrying sickness, exhaustion, fear, stigma, and they reached towards Jesus because they had heard that in him there is healing.
That is what we mean tonight by an inclusive Eucharist. That is what we mean in Together, in London and in the entire Together in the whole Church of England. That is what we mean and try to live out in this parish as you do in yours. Inclusion, not as a polite statement. Inclusion, not as a woke fashionable adjustment. But inclusion as a return to the centre of the Gospel: people drawing near to Jesus, and Jesus not sending them away.
So let’s say it plainly, because the Church struggles to say plain things.
We come as LGBTQ+ people and allies,
and we refuse shame.
We come with the complexity of gender,
and we refuse erasure.
We come as disabled people, visible and invisible disabilities
and we refuse to be treated as an afterthought.
We come with mental illness and trauma, anxiety and depression, bipolar, psychosis, PTSD, addiction and recovery
and we refuse the lie that suffering makes us less holy.
We come carrying poverty and precarity, the constant arithmetic of rent, food, transport, heating,
and we refuse a Church of generosity that forgets justice.
We come in all our ethnicities and histories, black and brown and white, immigrant and local, global London in one room and we refuse a Church that calls itself universal but centres only one kind of person.
We come with bodies that have been judged, and stories that have been doubted, and prayers that have been interrupted.
And we come not because we are perfect. We come because Jesus is here.
This is the definition of church, right here in tonight’s gospel: a crowd of people trying to get close enough to Jesus to be made whole.
And here’s the quiet punch in the Gospel: Jesus makes room for them, but he also tells the disciples to have a boat ready, “so that they would not crush him.”
That isn’t Jesus rejecting the crowd. That is Jesus protecting the possibility of healing. It’s Jesus showing us that true inclusion isn’t chaos and it isn’t performance. It’s care.
It’s safe space, not small space.
It’s dignity, not crowd-control.
It’s access and boundaries together, because bodies matter.
That’s a word for the Church right now. We are learning that welcome is not enough. You can welcome someone into a building and still leave them unsafe. You can welcome someone into a service and still leave them unheard. You can welcome someone into your theology and still keep them at arm’s length in your practice.
But Jesus does something more than welcome: Jesus creates belonging.
And when the unclean spirits shout out, “You are the Son of God!”, Jesus silences them. Even when the words are true, he refuses to let the truth be used as spectacle. Jesus refuses to let the moment become a fight for control. Jesus will not let other voices set the terms of his presence.
Jesus is not a trophy for anyone’s argument.
Jesus is not a weapon.
Jesus is a healer.
And that matters, because we live in a time when people try to use “Jesus” as a way of sorting who is in and who is out. But the Gospel shows us the exact polar opposite: Jesus is the one who moves towards the ones the world pushes away.
If you want to know what Jesus is like, Mark is telling you: Jesus is the one surrounded by the sick, the stigmatised, the desperate, the overlooked, and Jesus doesn’t recoil.
Then the other readings deepen it.
In the first reading, David is in danger because Saul has decided he is a problem. And Jonathan steps in, not with vague sympathy but with real intercession. He uses his closeness to power to protect the vulnerable. Jonathan is what love looks like when love grows teeth: courageous, practical, willing to risk reputation for someone else’s life.
That, too, is inclusion. Not sentiment. Protection.
Psalm 56 gives us the inside of it: fear, tears, sleeplessness. And it says something that some of us need to hear in church more often:
God does not only bless the strong.
God keeps count of the tossings.
God collects the tears.
And then Paul, in Corinthians, gives us the Church’s job description: “one body, many members.” And he says the part we sometimes try to skip: the members who seem weaker are indispensable, and the ones we consider less honourable are to be given greater honour.
That is not “everyone’s welcome so let’s move on.”
That is a command to reorganise our life together around those who have been pushed to the margins.
So tonight, at this table, we are not performing inclusion as an opinion. We are practising inclusion as a sacrament.
We are saying:
Our lives are not an argument.
Our bodies are not a problem.
Our existence is not a debate.
Our dignity is not rationed here.
And if we are honest, that is not just comforting. It is costly. Because it means that unlike so so so so many bishops, we can no longer pretend that neutrality is love. It means we can no longer keep the peace by keeping people quiet. It means we cannot choose harmony over honesty. It means the Church cannot continue to ask those who are harmed to wait patiently, while others get to feel settled.
But we’re not here tonight to intensify conflict. We’re here to become more faithful to Jesus.
And Jesus, in the Gospels, is faithful to this: Jesus makes room.
So as we come to the Eucharist, let it be the deepest memory of Jesus, not a memory that shrinks God, but a memory that tells the truth about God.
Jesus who touched the untouchable.
Jesus who ate with the despised.
Jesus who spoke with women as theologians.
Jesus who healed on the wrong day.
Jesus who crossed borders, religious and social and bodily.
Jesus who would not ration dignity.
And may this table do what it always does when it is real:
may it make us one body in Christ:
where welcome becomes belonging,
where truth leads to repair,
where justice is shared,
and where all can draw near and be healed.
May the Reign of God come in fullness and in glory.