Sermon Archive

Text: Luke 4:1-13 Temptation… In our day and age, what is the first thing that pops into your head when you hear that word? If you’re like most of society, we’ve all been well programmed by mass media. More often than not, the dreaded “t-word” reminds us of a diet, quitting smoking, or actively resisting something that we understand is bad for us, and yet by contrast is also pleasurable. When we see the term “sinful delight” it’s most often around the latest mouth-watering dessert that we’ve just given up for Lent… or that we realize that Tim Horton’s always seems to hold its “roll up the rim” event right in the midst of Lent. Somehow we’ve made temptation something that’s frivolous. Even inside the church, we’ve made it trivial. We don’t like to talk about temptation all that much… and usually when we do, we reduce it into really obvious, overly simplified yes or no kind of choices... Black and white… right and wrong… It’s what computer programmers call binary logic, it’s either on or...

Text : Luke 9:28-36 I have to admit, wearing this uniform today is more than just for show. As a congregation, we recently became sponsors for the 4th Clarkson Scout Group, including Beavers, Cubs and Scouts. As a symbol of that new partnership, I this past fall I was “invested” into 4th Clarkson… but I didn’t have to go out any buy a uniform. While I wear this symbolically, given our role as partners with 4th Clarkson, it’s also because I’ve personally been involved with Scouting since I was a child. I apparently was part of Beavers when it was only a pilot project some thirty years ago. I grew up in scouting, and it was a large part of my formative years… I went all the way through into Venturers, the next step past Scouts. I have a lot of fond memories of camping with scouts, I also have a lot of COLD memories of camp. I can wear it as a badge of honour that I once spent a weekend camping outdoors where the temperature before wind-chill dropped to minus 20°C. I should add that was...

Text : Luke 6:17-26 When doing sermon preparation each week, it’s not uncommon for us preacher types to look at the work of others to see how they handled the text. Given that both Sarah and I are ministers, we frequently exchange ideas. It’s part of the process… looking at how someone else approaches a given text, or what direction they’ve taken once they’ve had a chance to grapple with it. More often than not, Sarah and I find that we take different directions with a similar text, because we both find something different in the text that bubbles to the surface. We also find that where we preach has an impact on what we preach. A powerful “mountaintop” sermon that works really well in one place, can fall flat in another. One of the preachers I was reading this week took a really different tack on Luke’s version of the Beatitudes. He looked less at what Jesus said, and a bit more about how he actually preached it. I must admit it caught me a bit off guard, I found myself going “whoa!” ...

Text: Isaiah 6:1-8 and Luke 5:1-11 As some of you already know, shortly after Christmas, I received a letter in the mail. It’s one of those letters that everybody gets at least once in their life, and for whatever reason, we’ve come to dread it. No… it wasn’t a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency seeking to audit me… it was a summons to jury duty. This was a first for me. Never having been involved in the court system at all, I really didn’t know what to expect. It felt like such an inconvenience, as it could occupy a fair bit of my professional time… and not only that, I had an obligation to it. If I didn’t show up on a given date at a given time, I could actually run afoul of the courts themselves. Think of it this way, if I didn’t do anything, I could actually be in some pretty serious trouble. So I went. I found myself reflecting on the summons to jury duty in a similar way to God’s call to us. It was in the back of my mind, especially as people in the jury panel were called for...