Sermon Archive

Text: 1 Corinthians 13 Just ahead of my own wedding almost four years ago, I remember attending a handful of bridal shows. It’s a real eye-opening experience, because I began to realize how large an the wedding industry has become. Everything is designed to try to put together that fairy tale wedding, to make that special day “perfect.” Although I must admit, a great deal of what Sarah and I saw spilled over wholesale into sentimentality. It’s no wonder that wedding budgets have ballooned over the past number of years. Since Sarah and I are both licensed to conduct weddings, both of us were a bit put off with how much of these preparations overwhelm what marriage actually means. It seems as if the wedding has become divorced from marriage. Be that as it may, we still took in the displays for what they were… but then I stumbled across something that got me going off on a rant. Amongst a collection of various sentimental poems done up nicely in frames as a gift was this one… “Love is pat...

Text: 1 Corinthians 12:12-31 In the early nineties, there was an ecological research project which was hailed the next big step in the advancement of humanity. Called Biosphere 2, it was intended to show that humans could live within a completely sealed environment replicating earth’s environment –the “original” Biosphere. While inside, they’d grow their own food, and through plant life, effectively breathe their own air. Part of it was research into the sustainability of long-term space travel. The original project had eight of some of the most brilliant people on earth to come together and live within this massive edifice built near Tucson, Arizona. In addition to agricultural and living areas for its human occupants, the Biosphere 2 building houses tropical rain forest, desert, savannah, and cloud forest ecosystems as well as a coral reef within a miniature ocean. The hopes for it were idealistic… almost utopian… called a “New Age Eden” by many, the stuff of science fiction films… b...

Text: John 2:1-11 While this may seem hard to believe, I have periodically suffered from writer’s block. I sit down in front of a computer screen, or take a notepad and pen in hand and simply stare at the blank page. Nothing comes at all. It seems that every last creative drop has simply evaporated, and I have nothing left to give. Admittedly, that can be a real problem in my profession, given that part of the work that I do is to write a sermon every week… to try and draw out that “something” that helps us to connect our own individual stories to the Biblical story… to find our own way of connecting with God. What happens when the ideas run out? What happens when we have no energy left? What happens when we are burnt, spent, like a candle wick that has run out of wax? To borrow from the story in John’s Gospel, what happens when the wine runs out? It doesn’t just have to be writer’s block. It can simply be that sense of being burnt out… that our job doesn’t seem to have the same appeal...

Text : Isaiah 60:1-6 There are some wonderful coincidences in the suggested scripture readings that come around this time of year. I’ve had to get used to the website posting the readings every week automatically, that way if you really want to look ahead to see what today’s readings are, you can. The reading from Isaiah is often on the first Sunday of the New Year. “Arise, Shine, for your light has come.” I preached on the same text last year, as part of the message as we begin Epiphany… but there’s also something a bit funny beginning the New Year with Isaiah’s words. So let me paint a mental picture for you: it is the day after New Year’s 2007. The festivities are now over. The champagne is still drying in the carpet. The horns that made enough noise to take the dead now rest in thankful silence. The confetti that once decorated peoples’ hair lies peacefully on the floor, waiting to be tracked about the house for the next three months. The home is as still as the seventh day of crea...