Sermons

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 ...

Lent happens every year so it isn’t so much a surprise as wondering what I can say about Lent that hasn’t been said before, maybe even by me!? I am not interested in skipping parts of the Liturgical Year, especially not for such a shabby reason as . . . it’s not easy. I am grateful ...

Transfiguration and transformation are quite similar words. They are obviously not identical, neither in spelling nor meaning, but are they different? There are many different words meaning virtually or literally the same thing . . . what about these two? As I thought about Transfiguration Sunday and reviewed the texts for today I began to think ...

There are a lot of things we are asked to do as followers of Christ. Today’s Gospel text has some of the toughest. Luke 6:27-38 is part of the Sermon on the Plain and includes: loving your enemy, turning the other cheek, allowing corrupt laws to take your property, the Golden Rule, and more. One of the ...

Why might we want to talk about trees? I’m from Saskatchewan so I suppose it could be some sort of jealousy, southern Saskatchewan doesn’t have a lot of trees but northern Saskatchewan has a bazillion trees so don’t look down on the whole province. It isn’t jealousy. I wanted to talk about trees because they show ...

We like explanations, or perhaps more correctly, we don’t like unexplained things. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, it is part of what makes us human. But what do we do when there is no explanation? This happens quite frequently when we read Scripture. There are many, many things we can’t explain especially when ...

We sometimes lose sight of how important love really is. We are coming up on Valentine’s Day but I’m not thinking only of romantic love. I don’t have anything against romantic love, I think it is great, but our New Testament text, 1 Corinthians 13, talks about a love that includes romantic love but is ...