Sermons

Virtually every human being wants to be part of a group. There are people who prefer solitude above everything else, but they are very much in the minority. We want to know we are “in.” There is not much wrong with the desire to be included but we cannot lose sight of the reality for ...

Today is the second Sunday in May. More importantly, it is the Fourth Sunday of Easter. This year there is some crossover between the two. The second Sunday in May in Canada is Mothers’ Day (or Mother’s Day if you prefer). This is a tricky Sunday. One of the trickiest parts of it is how many ...

Eating. Eating is something we all do, maybe too much or too little but we all do it. Eating is something everyone in the Bible did too. If Jesus’ ministry was three years and he ate three meals a day (365 X 3 X 3 = 3285) he ate a lot of meals. So what? My ...

The sermon title this week is “Do we need to see?” which is obviously a rhetorical question but it comes from what I think is an important deeper question. The impetus for my thinking on the whole thing comes from our Gospel lesson this Sunday, which is the well-known story of Jesus’ disciple Thomas needing more ...

So why am I talking about thanksgiving? You note there is a lower case “t” in the last sentence but there is a strongly implied upper cast “T.” Hadley and I used to work with a number of college students back in the 90s and early 00s. College students can almost always be convinced to eat ...

There are not a lot of specifically “dual-purpose” days in the church year. There might only be one, today. Today is Palm/Passion Sunday. I think I might have mentioned, in one or the other of the sermons, the futility of fulminating against the lazy society we are in with “no one” attending Good Friday services anymore. ...

Oscar Wilde said a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Whether or not a cynic is well-served by the definition is less of interest to me than the overall discussion of value and what things might be worth. Two of our Lectionary texts this Sunday specifically address the ...

The Lectionary sometimes makes more sense than other times. This Sunday we have an Old Testament lesson about the Israelites finally entering the promised land and a Gospel lesson about the Prodigal Son. This is a bit of an odd combination. It is especially notable in that the Lectionary separates out the story of the ...

It seems there is a hunger these days to find out about our ancestors. For fees starting at around a hundred dollars, you can have companies analyze your DNA and tell you how much of various ethnicities you may have. I understand the interest, I have a similar interest coming from my ongoing fascination with ...

Everyone is afraid of something or some things. This does not make all of us cowards; bravery is going forward even though one is afraid. Anyone who literally has no fear is probably suffering from a genetic disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease. Not having any fear is a recipe for disaster. That being said, very few of ...