Sermons

Here we are. The first Sunday of Advent. The first Sunday of a new liturgical year, Year A if you are keeping score at home. A time for new beginnings. I am always very grateful the first Sunday of Advent is the Sunday of Hope. I can’t think of a better way to begin a ...

In case you think this post’s title “Two different sermons” is some cutesy thing it isn’t. The Liturgical Sunday for today is the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost but St. Mark’s is having a “Hanging of the Greens” service next Sunday so . . . The Knox Presbyterian Sunday is Pentecost 23 and the St. Mark’s Presbyterian ...

Today was Remembrance Sunday, at least for us. There a a lot of ways one can go with Remembrance Sunday, it is complicated when it coincides with Remembrance Day but there are some givens regardless of the calendar date.  We observed two minutes of silence, which is a very long time for most of us. ...

I have been enjoying putting myself into biblical stories lately. Well, maybe “enjoying” isn’t the exact word because it isn’t always enjoyable, even when it is very valuable. I don’t do it very well. I find it difficult to imagine myself into these stories, or any stories for that matter. I don’t know if it ...

 I wasn’t entirely sure where this week’s texts were going to take me/us but I wasn’t surprised when the longer I looked at them and thought about them and sat with them that the Luke text became the focus. As I mention, this week in the Lectionary is a challenge for me because I have a ...

Days. The good old days. The bad old days. Better days. Back in the day. We talk about days a lot, which makes sense, a day is a handy and flexibly measure. There are all sorts of ways to define a day, 24 hours, sunup to sundown, one sleep to the next sleep. We also encounter ...

 It’s Thanksgiving Sunday, at least in Canada, so it seemed like a good idea to reflect on being thankful . . . as long as the Lectionary provided an appropriate text. As is so often the case there was an appropriate text but not the obvious one. The Gospel lesson is the story of Jesus healing ...

Shame. Embarrassment. These are not words we like applied to us. I have never met anyone who wants to feel ashamed. I have met many people who have gone to the most extraordinary lengths to avoid it. Paul in his second letter to Timothy¹ writes to say “Do not be ashamed” (2 Timothy 1:8a NRSV). ...

 Contentment is a tricky word. For some people, the connotations of contentment include a fatalistic “settling” for what is and giving up on anything else or anything better. I hasten to point out, this is not what is meant by contentment, especially not when Paul uses it in 2 Timothy. Contentment isn’t settling for what ...

It seems for lots of us, the shorter the word the easier it is to misunderstand or even misuse it. Today we are talking about what the word “all” might mean for us in a particular context. The Lectionary’s Epistle lesson for this Sunday is 1 Timothy 2:1-7, we focused primarily on the first three verses. “1 ...