Sermons
It’s grace
My favourite definition of grace is, “the unmerited favour of God.” This can be tricky sometimes. Oh, it is clear enough for us, it is when other people receive grace that we can have difficulties with it. A further barrier can be our regrettable tendency to see all the good things we know in God as being New Testament things . . . or even later. We spend some time…
Hospitality and laughter
As I was getting ready for this Sunday’s sermon I found myself going back again to the Old Testament lesson. In this story we see Abraham providing hospitality, with Sarah’s help of course, and Sarah laughing. I was hoping to connect the two of them and I’m not convinced I did. Please let me know in the comments or directly if you think I made it or didn’t. Regardless of…
Called? Yes or no?
Have you ever been called? As rhetorical questions go, that isn’t a very good one. Everyone had been called. We have been called on the phone, called to the phone, called names, called to PASS THE BALL!!, called for dinner, the list is endless. We have been called by our parents, siblings, friends, partner(s), enemies, telemarketers, . . . another endless list. How about this for a better question, and…
Numbers have their place
I am not a numbers person. I know lots of numbers of questionable utility, for example, Ted Williams hit .406 as the last Major League baseball player to hit the ball four out of ten attempts. I have no familiarity or facility with math beyond very basic algebra. I can do the four arithmetical operations pretty well, sometimes even not using pencil and paper. I bring up numbers on Trinity…
And they’re off!
I have been rethinking Pentecost. It is almost never a bad thing to re-think what we know well. The things we know well, or at least think we know well, never get rethought, which can be too bad. Perhaps you thought the same way about Pentecost as I did. “Indoor wind, tongues of fire (whatever those are), speaking weirdly, accusations of drunkenness . . . yeah, I’ve got this one.”…
What does a “little while” mean?
What does a “little while” mean anyway? Peter in his first letter talks about a “little while” in the context of the early church’s suffering and that it will end in that amount of time. I can’t recall what the best estimate for when Peter wrote the letter but it is more than a thousand years ago, closer to two thousand, and that isn’t “little” in my context. So. When…
Let’s think about love
Sometimes it’s a good thing to re-think what we think about significant things. This week’s texts led me to re-think what love might look like these days. We all know what love looks like at least in a lot of situations. I am especially interested in what it might mean to love people in our online and other less personal interactions. There is something about the simplistic binaries that lead…
Building material
There is an almost endless array of images and metaphors in the Bible. Some of them are more helpful than others, for example, some of the more rural metaphors can be difficult for urban folks to grasp. The metaphor we worked with today is from St. Peter’s first letter and is building material, particularly stones. Peter tells his original recipients, and us, that as part of being in a relationship…
Seeing is on my mind
Seeing is on my mind these days because I am getting cataract surgery this week, Thurs and Saturday. I am having them removed, not added (such a comedian). I am fairly certain I would have used our Gospel lesson regardless of any upcoming surgeries. The story of the two travellers on the road to the village of Emmaus is reasonably well-known. I have preached on it before, three years of…
So . . . who’s a Thomas?
Jesus’ disciple named Thomas is another one of those Bible characters we seem to feel we can kick around. Thomas has become famous, so famous in fact his honorific “Doubting” has moved into common speech with many people not knowing the label “a doubting Thomas” comes from the Gospel of John. The tradition I grew up in tended to put Thomas in the category of someone who should know better…