Sermons

Dignity is easier to recognize than define. Definitions from dictionaries include words like reserve, seriousness, appearance, honoured, etc. I prefer to be dignified to undignified, I’m willing to guess I’m not alone in this, but what if my definition of “dignified” is to narrow to contain some dignified behaviour? Is it possible to wrestle around on the ...

Our faith community celebrates Canada Day on the Sunday closest to July 1, which was today. This has been a very difficult Canada Day season for many, for everyone I know. The continuing revelations of unmarked or mass graves attached to residential schools has been a traumatic and painful reminder of the scandal of a Canadian ...

We all have giants in our lives. Everyone has had to face a metaphorical giant at some time. Our Old Testament lesson was the story of David facing Goliath; David faced a literal giant. David was successful against Goliath and was completely confident he would be. How could he know? In the story we read how ...

None of us gets everything write always.* We are fallible people living in a fallen world. We make mistakes because of silliness, stupidity, carelessness, ignorance, . . . the list goes on and on. There is one part of us, an extraordinarily useful part of us, that can lead to errors. The part I’m talking about is ...

PLEASE NOTE: our house suffered a brief power failure in the middle of the sermon so you will hear a break, then a few words from me about it, and then the sermon continues. My apologies for the jolt. There is something essentially human of wanting and NOT wanting to wait for it. It is this combination, ...

Needless to say I am not got to tell you what the Trinity is ALL about because that is really, very much, beyond any human person. The sermon title is “What’s it all about?” and is referencing Trinity Sunday rather than the Trinity in its entirety. The Trinity, much like “eternity,” is fundamentally beyond us and ...

Everything, except for God, has to begin somewhere and sometime. This includes the church. Not only did whatever church you may worship in have to begin sometime it had to have a place where it began. This is not revolutionary, it is common sense. The Day of Pentecost is when the church as we know it ...

Asking why someone writes, or wrote, is a tricky question. I am a writer and I don’t always have a good answer to this question. When we start asking the question about people who have been dead for any length of time, let alone hundreds and hundreds of years a satisfactory answer may simply not ...

It is a rare person who never doubts what they know about themselves. We all need reassurance in something at some time. We might need to be reminded we are good parent/sibling/child/. . . . We know these things but we don’t feel them at the moment. It is common for people who are in a ...

So do we even need to ask this question? For that matter, does it have an answer? Surely God is too big, too much, to fit into such a simple question. Well of course this is the case. The question isn’t intended to get at an exhaustive answer as that is beyond us. Rather, the question ...