Sermon Archive

Text: Leviticus 25:8-17 Jubilee! It’s a term that probably all of us are familiar with, or at very least we’ve heard it before. In Calgary, there’s a large concert hall called the “Jubilee Auditorium.” As a child, this was the only place I really heard the term. Whenever I heard someone mentioned about a Jubilee anniversary, I just thought they were having a big party at the Auditorium. It would only be later that someone actually had the heart to tell me that Jubilee actually meant a 50th Anniversary. “ Oh! Okay…” I would say… “Wow, fifty years?? You must be old!!” …of course, this was also before I learned what the phrase “being tactful” meant. The trouble is, many of you are probably thinking that I need to go back and actually learn what Jubilee means, because I am getting ahead of myself. After all, today we’re celebrating our 49th Anniversary as a congregation. The big five-oh is next year, and isn’t that what we call our Jubilee? Well… kind of… In many ways the word “Jubilee” ...

Texts : Mark 10:35-45 ; Job 38:1-41 At some point early on in my career, I stumbled across a saying that I try to take to heart every week when preparing sermons. It is a real caution, and a reminder of the responsibility that comes with this pulpit every week. The saying is quite simple, really… but its implications are far reaching. It goes something like this: “Beware of finding a Jesus that is entirely congenial to you. ” In other words, be careful because there is a human tendency to want to see Jesus in a way that is entirely friendly to us. Although it’s far more than just a nice, safe Jesus who seems agree that everything we do is okay in God’s eyes... that somehow Jesus fits our image, our ideas, our thoughts as to what should be, and not the other way around. Perhaps it’s better to say, beware of finding the Jesus you want to find. It has been a struggle for a very long time… wanting to essentially create or shape God in our image, instead of the other way around. One of the...

Text: Mark 10:17-31 Earlier this week I was talking to my parents about the gospel reading for today. Through some of my preliminary reading, I’ve noticed how much that we try to soften the edge on some of the really difficult sayings that we find in the Bible. The reading that we hear from Mark is one that we would prefer to skip, or at very least gloss over. Jesus says that it is easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle, than a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God. It’s a hard one for us as well-off North Americans to hear a passage like this. So we try to soften the edge. Dad told me of a story from the church that he worked at as an organist around the time that I was born. When preaching on this passage, the priest told a story of a gate in Jerusalem, apparently called the “eye of the needle” where people could easily walk through, but camels would have a great deal of difficulty. They would have to get down on their knees and shuffle through… So while a hard a...

Texts: Joel 2:21-27 ; Luke 17:11-19 Thanksgiving is one of those holidays in the national calendar that spills over into church life, rather than the other way around. Similar to Mother’s Day, it’s a holiday that the government declared, and churches as a whole happily adopted. Neither of them really have any historical basis as far as the church is concerned, and as such, neither of them actually appears in the yearly church calendar. However, unlike Mother’s Day, setting time aside to give thanks to God for the harvest and the growing season has long and deep roots in the Biblical tradition. Part of the reason it doesn’t have a set time of year in the Christian calendar is that growing seasons have different starts and ends all over the world… It would be silly to celebrate harvest thanksgiving in Australia, when they just celebrated the first day of Spring a couple weeks ago! In essence, thanksgiving as a specific day tends to float around, depending on where people live, but markin...

Text: James: 5:13-20 After last week’s brief foray into Presbyterians Sharing… We find ourselves back with our conversation with James. As short as this book is relative to others, its power is hard to ignore. I looked at the other suggested readings, perhaps looking to preach on something that is directly connected with today being World Communion Sunday… to talk about the elements that we use in celebration… bread and wine, symbolizing the body and blood, and what unifies us as Christians. Yet James’ call for prayer has a deep resonance in any community. The importance of caring for one another within the local congregation is vital to how we live out our faith. In fact, it’s so important that it is precisely what unifies us as Christians… entirely appropriate for a day like today. As I have mentioned before, James was less a letter and more a sermon. It was originally delivered to a congregation somewhere in that intervening period between the initial short-lived persecutions under ...