Sermons
Don’t worry
Today is Remembrance Sunday. I know it is quite a few days before November 11 but I think it is important to have the Sunday devoted to Remembrance Day before the actual day rather than after. The sermon isn’t as specific to Remembrance Day as some I have preached but there are still some tie-ins, at least I think so, let me know if you feel otherwise. What I am…
Why do we want to know?
We humans seem to have some sort of built-in compulsion to know “why?” As someone once commented, “we want to know why, and we want to know why we want to know why, even though we never will” as what it means to be human. There is a subset of spiritually aware people who want to know who is “in” and who is “out.” I know what it is to…
Which one am I?
I don’t like binaries and the sermon title for this Sunday is deliberately chosen to highlight binaries . . . so I can redefine these two as ends of a continuum. The primary text for the sermon is Luke 18:9-14, a passage frequently called the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. It is a story familiar to many about a self-righteous Pharisee being compared to a rather desperate…
Scripture . . .
Scripture. Holy Writ. The Bible. What do we do with it? I am sure even asking the question, “What do we do with Scripture?” makes some people uncomfortable. The goal isn’t to make anyone feel uncomfortable but to ask the question and mean it! What do we do with Scripture? Do we take every word literally? Do we ignore it entirely? Do we try to live our life by it?…
Endurance, not just for ultramarathoners
Endurance. The very word strikes fear into the hearts of many of us. We don’t like to be put in a position to endure, at least I don’t. I want to be in a position where the only thing I can do is thrive . . . preferably without too much work on my part. However, the call to endure isn’t always something we can choose to heed or ignore….
Faith . . . some thoughts
Faith is one of those words we can use quite well without necessarily being able to define it. There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way, peace be upon my English teachers who tried to teach me otherwise. Being able to use a word correctly, and even elegantly, does not require you to be able to spout a dictionary-esque definition upon command. I am not spending a lot of time…
Let’s talk about “stuff”
There is an old bit by George Carlin, the standup comedian, about “stuff.” If you remember it, this Sunday’s sermons are not drawn from it . . . at least not intentionally. I talked about “stuff” today because it is important to think about the stuff in our lives. Stuff is our possessions of course but it also includes non-tangible things like our achievements and our reputations. One of the…
Seems pretty straightforward to me
I kick off both sermons with a statement something to the effect of, ‘there are some difficult words in Scripture,” and there are. However, I am not talking about those words difficult to translate from Hebrew, Greek, and very occasionally Aramaic. I am not talking about wrestling with the Greek grammatical case able to say, “We have been saved, are being saved, and will be saved,” in a single word….
Found? Found! And found again!
This past week has been one to remember, even if we might wish to forget it. As a community, Saskatchewan grieved the loss of more than ten people at the hands of a murderer. We joined with the rest of the world, especially the countries of the Commonwealth, in losing Queen Elizabeth II. Many of us had individual experiences of grief and loss on top of the community losses. It…
Do you want to talk about cost or choice?
There is something a little different about this Sunday’s sermons, they are entirely different from each other. I know some of you may be saying, “I’ve listened to your same-day-different-congregation-sermon-pairs before and they are sometimes quite different. This time they are different because the Knox sermon comes from Deuteronomy and St. Mark’s sermon comes from Luke. The reason they are different is the differing composition of the congregations. At Knox…