Sermons

 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 ...

Have you ever been lost? I have. I have been lost more times than I like to remember. In fact, I’ve been lost so often I suspect sometimes I haven’t even known I was lost. It isn’t all bad. My complete inability to deal with North, South, East, and West most of the time played a ...

It is okay to wish things were easier as long as we remember that wishing and reality don’t always overlap. Jesus wanted to make sure his followers knew everything wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. In our Gospel lesson for this Sunday Jesus tells us “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow ...

Asking questions seems to be fundamental to the human experience. I seem to recall my developmental psychology professor telling the class pre-schoolers can ask more than four hundred “Why” questions a day; a statistic I can easily believe. Being asked questions can be irritating but it can also be illuminating. When someone asks you why you ...

Endings can be hard, especially when we don’t know when they will be coming or what they will look like. Oh wait, did you think I was going to bang on about death and dying again? Not this time. This Sunday we are talking, briefly at least, about eschatology. Eschatology is the study of the last ...