Sermons

 I am not immune to what is happening in the world around me as it relates to sermons, I am frequently indifferent which is not at all the same thing. The Olympics are currently going on in Rio and it was a delightful coincidence when it comes to the combination of athletics and this week’s ...

 The sermon title this week is another rhetorical question, “Do I have faith?” This is intended as an inclusive “I” not just an opportunity for me to ramble on about myself in front of an audience. It is a good question to think about. It was triggered this week by the Lectionary’s epistle reading which ...

We love lists. We love to see where we fit when we have answered a list of questions. Bring these two things together and we might have a problem with Colossians 3:1-11, the epistle lesson for today. Paul provides a list of behaviours that we should not engage in and there is an all too ...

This week’s sermon title is “Let’s talk prayer” which means it could be preached virtually any Sunday 🙂 In this case, the Lectionary has us looking at Luke 11 where the so-called shorter Lord’s Prayer is found. The passage continues to verse 13 which means it includes a couple of Jesus’ funniest illustrations as well ...

This Sunday we are looking at another choice; the choice between “being” and “doing.” Now I’m sure some of you out there are snorting and saying, “Look! Another false dichotomy.” and you wouldn’t be wrong. This is a false dichotomy or at the very least, a unnecessarily forced choice. The sermon comes from the well ...

 Today’s Gospel lesson includes one of the best known stories in the Bible; the story of the Good Samaritan. At its heart this story is one of inclusion. The story begins with someone, a lawyer, asking Jesus how to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks how the lawyer thinks it works. The lawyer says to love God ...

 There is something essentially human about taking the easy way. It is such a part of being human that we have turned it into a vice. What once was a path to efficiency and minimizing effort has become something to be avoided. There are very few of us who haven’t heard some variation on “don’t ...

 This Sunday we talked about laws and law. There is something fundamentally human about the need to make laws or rules and something equally fundamentally human about trying to circumvent those laws or rules. I wonder if this second tendency is the source of Paul’s observation in Romans 5:20 “But law came in, with the ...

It is virtually impossible for us, as humans, to keep from putting people and things into categories. Categorization isn’t bad or evil, it is just a thing that we all do. I have read that one of the actions that we do best is pattern recognition, which is all about categories. We put what we ...

I preach about grace fairly often. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, after all grace is one of the hallmarks of following Jesus so it shows up in the Lectionary texts with some frequency. I also very much enjoy preaching about grace because it is one of the hardest things for me, and ...