Sermons
Between two extremes
This is the beginning of Holy Week. In other times and other places this Sunday would be Palm Sunday, pure and simple. In this time and this place (and many others) this is Palm / Passion Sunday. Our schedules of work and other responsibilities have made a traditional Good Friday service virtually impossible for most folks so this Sunday is a conflation of Palm Sunday and Good Friday. This is…
Death doesn’t have to equal the end
The Lectionary texts for this week all seem to revolve around death and resurrection, which makes them especially appropriate for Lent I suppose. As I reflected on them the more I came to see a theme of death as ending; not death as the end of life but rather death as a metaphor for the end of . . . anything, including hope.* This reflection led me further to look…
A priori for everyone!
The Lectionary texts for this week led me to deliver a sermon titled “Blind? Or just not seeing?” It seems almost beyond belief that anyone would choose to be physically blind but many of us choose willful blindness in what we think, believe, support or do. With these sermons I am trying to get us to seriously consider how vital it is for us to examine our blind spots (for…
Are you thirsty? I am!
So how many of us know what it means to be thirsty, not the “I just ate a bag of chips and now I’m thirsty” but the real thing? I’m willing to guess that not a lot of us have experience actual, real thirst. There aren’t all that many things that we require for life but water is one of them. Thirst is what alerts us to our need for…
Metaphors matter!
Whether we like it or not, we live our lives by metaphors. met•a•phor (mĕtˈə-fôrˌ, -fər) n. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world’s a stage” ( Shakespeare). n. One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol: “Hollywood has always been an irresistible,…
Yippee!
Today is the first Sunday in Lent, so you may be wondering what is with a blog title like “Yippee!”? Lent is misunderstood. There is a tendency to look at Lent as a time where the whole point is to be miserable. You run into people who are giving things up for Lent just to give something up. Lent is one of the very few seasons in the church year…
What do we see?
There can be a tension between seeing and really seeing, much like the tension between hearing and listening. This tension came up when I began thinking of the Transfiguration. When the disciples who were on that mountain with Jesus witnessed the Transfiguration they saw Jesus in a new light but what crossed my mind was, could they have “seen” the same Jesus without the experience of the Transfiguration? It isn’t a frivolous…
Sure you can
It is good to be back . . . again. I was away for a work retreat (it was in Mexico so don’t waste any sympathy on me) which meant that I missed two Sundays in a row. There is nothing like a bit of absence to help you remember how much you enjoy doing something, in this case, it was good to be reminded of how much I enjoy…
What is wisdom?
Well it is nice to be back in Canada for a few days, which makes it sound like international travel is just a regular part of my life, which it most certainly is not. Notwithstanding it is nice to be back. I was away last Sunday watching Heather’s niece (which makes her my niece too I suppose) get married in a very lovely resort near Cancun. The picture was taken…
Language and theology
Okay, this post should probably be called “Language and theology . . . sort of” but I didn’t want to put that many periods into a title. As I mention in both of my sermons and as is completely and unavoidably obvious to anyone who knows me, I love language. I am limited to the English language, which is actually kind of pitiful, so I love the English language. It…