Sermon Archive

For Ascension Sunday 2006 Text: Ephesians: 1:15-23 This past week, all the theatrical film buzz has been about the DaVinci Code, the movie based on Dan Brown’s best-selling novel. In spite of being slaughtered by the critics, and slammed by church officials, the domestic box office for the film was $77.8 Million, and a record-breaking $153 million in the foreign-opening market… It perhaps proves the point that any publicity is good publicity. The fastest way to get anyone to see something or read something is for a representative of an old staid institution to tell you to not go and see it! Go figure. So I went out and saw it this week… call it sermon research… honest! One film critic wrote that the movie tries too hard to take the novel as a serious theological treatise, rather than the pulpy airport mystery novel that it is. I tend to agree… Maybe that’s where we need to leave it… a fanciful work of fiction… but at the same time, it has people talking. I didn’t hate the film… found i...

Text: John 15:9-17 In many respects, this weekend is the first weekend of what we really consider to be the Canadian Summer. Sure, Summer doesn’t official arrive until near the end of June, but then again, since fall seems to arrive all too early in Canada, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking a “month’s advance” on Summer… especially if the weather’s nice. It’s the Victoria Day Weekend! I am glad that there are as many of you as there are here today, but at the same time I am in no way begrudging anyone in how they are spending their time. The idea of Sabbath, or a time of rest is very much sacred to our faith, and yet so often we tend to skip it. The Victoria Day weekend is about Sabbath, in whatever form it comes. It is about resting and relaxing: taking a bit of time out of the busy spring schedule to simply relax, maybe go up to the cottage… but most of all spend time with both family and friends. As a community, we place a very high value on friendship… and take whate...

Text: John 15:1-8 With all the good weather we’ve been having lately, I expect most people are going about the routines of spring… getting the gardens ready. Blooms and bedding plants are already making appearances in flower beds, hailing the approach of the summer months. After all, next week is the May long weekend, the “unofficial” start of cottage season for many. Sarah and I have tulips growing in our front garden… something we didn’t know was there when we moved in last October… it was a nice touch actually. In spite of some bouts of rain, Spring is upon us. I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. The Easter season parallels spring, images of resurrection and new life are all around us. Especially as we see it flowing back into the flora and fauna around us. Growth and growing is on our minds. Life returns, restored and healed from the deathly grip of winter. We don’t just see it in the buds and leaves on the trees, or in the flowers, but our own houses undergo the ...

Text: Psalm 23 This morning, we sang the words of the well-known 23rd Psalm. This passage of Scripture is probably the best known, most loved, and most quoted portion of the entire Bible. It is so familiar that people who seldom go to church or read the Bible can often quote a portion of it. It has great meaning because it conveys that sense of peace and comfort, especially in times of grief, trials and death. Something that we have experienced first-hand this past week. Times of trial come to all of us. Baseball player Roy Campanella was in an accident that left him a semi-invalid. In his autobiography he talks about the many nights he cried himself to sleep, about the pain that racked his body and his sinking into deep depression. He writes, “All my life whenever I was in trouble, I had turned to God for help. Remembering this, I opened by Bible to the 23rd Psalm and read: `Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me...

Text: Psalm 150 Get on a bus, or subway and I can almost guarantee that someone, somewhere in that car is wearing a pair of white headphones. (They look something like this)…They’re usually attached to an iPod... For those of you don’t know what an iPod is, it is a small piece of technology that can fits in your pocket that one can play music on. While that’s not particularly revolutionary, it’s the simple volume of stuff these tiny little things can hold. The latest version of the iPod can hold 15,000 songs, 25,000 photographs or 150 hours worth of video. If you think of it this way, it can hold as many songs as normally would be found on more than one-thousand compact discs, or roughly 800 pounds of vinyl records! It weighs just a couple of ounces, and can have one’s entire music library on it. Theoretically you could hit “play” have it run twenty four hours a day, and not have it repeat a single song for more than forty days! Music has become very easy to share and to play these day...

Easter Sunday 2006 Text: Mark 16:1-8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. It’s not supposed to end like that!! What do you mean that they went out and fled from the tomb and said nothing to anyone? It is an ending that we hardly expect, especially since we have been building towards this for so long. Easter morning is finally here, we come out with our trumpets, our voices, expecting a big angel chorus, shining lights, fireworks and spectacle… and all we get is that those who went to the tomb ran away in fear. It’s as if the story simply stops mid-sentence. What a letdown! After all, this is Easter Sunday! Early in the morning Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome go out to the tomb where Jesus was laid to rest. They brought herbs and spices with them so that they could anoint his body as was the funeral customs. The Sabbath was over, and so now this task that normally wo...

Psalm 22 Mark 15:21-41 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me??” What does it feel like to be abandoned? This day is for all of us who know the desperation and despair of being totally alone. It has been said that one of the first major crises for a child is separation from their parents. The time when a baby cries out, and their parents either do not hear, or do not come. Somehow as we grow older, we encounter this same crises over and over again in different forms. Psychologists and psychiatrists spend a great deal of their time analyzing human anxiety, and separation and abandonment is perhaps one of the greatest ones to touch the human soul. Yet separation is more than just a sense of anxiety, it is a genuine theological crisis that every single one of us faces. At some point in our lives, each one of us will feel as if we are abandoned, whether it is by a friend, our family, society, or even God. It is a theological crisis, because we struggle with what it means. Our sense of a...