Sermon Archive

Text: Romans 5:1-11 I think one of the challenges that I have been finding this Lent is to find a way to stick to this overall theme of Healthy Spirituality. When combined with the various things that are also happening on these various Sundays, it can be a bit hard to try and maintain that focus. Our first Sunday in Lent was led by the Prayer and Praise Group, last week was Baden Powell or Scouting Sunday… this week it’s the Annual Meeting. It’s part of this time of year… but it is also reality. Our Spirituality, our relationship with God, does not happen in a vacuum, it happens in the midst of all of this busy-ness that we experience in everyday life. The real challenge is how we integrate it into our everyday living, how we carry it into the workplace, how we live it out in our homes, wherever we are. Over the past two weeks, I have been trying to highlight elements of healthy Spirituality. At it’s best, our relationship with God should be as natural as breathing, and is simply part...

Text: Genesis 12:1-4 As most of you know, I spent much of my formative years in the Scouting movement. I was even a part of Beavers just as it was transitioning from being an experimental program to an official national part of Scouts. I continued on up through Cubs, Scouts, and then Ventures. Had it been available, I may have continued on through Rovers as well. I know that some of you have also had the benefit of this experience. What most of you probably don’t know is that the reason I am doing what I am doing now… being a Presbyterian Minister… has a lot to do with my involvement with Scouts from an early age. Actually, probably far more than anybody here realizes. It may be one of the reasons why I’ve been encouraging and supporting our congregation’s sponsorship of the 4th Clarkson Group. Let me give you a bit of history on this. In 1978, my Dad did a year-long teacher exchange, taking the whole family, my brother, myself, my Mom to live in Niagara Falls for one year. The idea wa...

Text: Genesis 2:14-17; 3:1-13 Lent is one of those seasons where perhaps people are bit a more aware that at least something happens in those days leading up to Easter. The trouble is, we’re never quite sure of what that something actually is. The visible signs, at least in churches like ours, are a bit more obvious: the colours have changed. We have the seasonal banners up, a different pulpit hanging, a tablecloth… even the colour on the screens is different… and it’s all purple. Okay… big deal! So what? Unlike the climate seasons that we all love to talk about, the seasons of the church calendar are ones that we choose to participate in. We have some deal of control as to whether or not we buy into the idea. By contrast, we don’t really have that much control as to whether we want to participate in winter… it’s there, and we either deal with it or become snowbirds and head south. The seasons of the church year are ones that we can be intentional about… that we can choose to participa...

Transfiguration Sunday Texts: Matthew 17:1-9 ; Exodus 24:12-18 Note: This sermon was accompanied by a series of pictures that my wife and I had taken at the summit of Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii that simply ran in the background while I preached this. Follow this link to a page for similar pictures. As some of you probably know, at the end of October last year, my parents generously flew my family out to visit them on the island of Maui in Hawaii. It was only a week’s stay, but certainly worth the long airplane trip to a warm, tropical paradise in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I’m not sure how many of you have ever been to Maui, but one of the major geographic features on the island is the dormant volcano that makes up the entirety of the east part of the island. In the Hawaiian language, it’s called Haleakala, which roughly translates to “House of the Sun.” It rises more than ten thousand feet above sea-level, and more than 25,000 feet above the sea floor. It may be all well and good, ...