Sermons

I am not a numbers person. I know lots of numbers of questionable utility, for example, Ted Williams hit .406 as the last Major League baseball player to hit the ball four out of ten attempts. I have no familiarity or facility with math beyond very basic algebra. I can do the four arithmetical operations ...

I have been rethinking Pentecost. It is almost never a bad thing to re-think what we know well. The things we know well, or at least think we know well, never get rethought, which can be too bad. Perhaps you thought the same way about Pentecost as I did. “Indoor wind, tongues of fire (whatever those ...

What does a “little while” mean anyway? Peter in his first letter talks about a “little while” in the context of the early church’s suffering and that it will end in that amount of time. I can’t recall what the best estimate for when Peter wrote the letter but it is more than a thousand ...

Sometimes it’s a good thing to re-think what we think about significant things. This week’s texts led me to re-think what love might look like these days. We all know what love looks like at least in a lot of situations. I am especially interested in what it might mean to love people in our ...

There is an almost endless array of images and metaphors in the Bible. Some of them are more helpful than others, for example, some of the more rural metaphors can be difficult for urban folks to grasp. The metaphor we worked with today is from St. Peter’s first letter and is building material, particularly stones. Peter ...

Seeing is on my mind these days because I am getting cataract surgery this week, Thurs and Saturday. I am having them removed, not added (such a comedian). I am fairly certain I would have used our Gospel lesson regardless of any upcoming surgeries. The story of the two travellers on the road to the village ...

Jesus’ disciple named Thomas is another one of those Bible characters we seem to feel we can kick around. Thomas has become famous, so famous in fact his honorific “Doubting” has moved into common speech with many people not knowing the label “a doubting Thomas” comes from the Gospel of John. The tradition I grew ...

Today is the best day of the year; better than my birthday, Christmas, or the first (or last) day of school. Today is Easter Sunday. So what makes today so good? Good enough to be called “the best”? I suppose it is mostly because without this day none of the other candidates would be as good, ...

There are many puzzles in our lives going from the entertaining kind, jigsaw puzzles for example to the more important ones. Important is a very flexible word and a subjective one at that. For some, an important puzzle is why does toast fall butter side down? For others, it is how Ensteinian physics can be ...

We usually say “Life and death.” It is so ingrained I even titled my sermon, “Life and death” and then go on to say I got it wrong. I would have been much better off using the title of this post. I think life before death makes sense when we are looking linearly at life ...