Sermon Archive

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 ...

Texts: 1 Chronicles 29:1-9;14-18 and 1 Peter 2:4-5; 9-10 Note: Scripture readings are from "The Message" contemporary translation. The original version of this sermon was prepared by Olywn Coughlin for the Presbyterian Church in Canada for resources to be used on Presbyterians Sharing... Sunday. This version was modified for the service at Clarkson Road Presbyterian Church. Readers included John Crowdis (minister), Barb Sypher, and Jordan Wall ensured that the appropriate slides were up at the appropriate time. John: This is a picture of Duff’s Presbyterian Church in South-western Ontario. Local settlers built the original building in 1854 on land donated by one family. They built it from the stones farmers cleared from their fields, and wood from around their community. Barb: The stones were rough fieldstones. Nuisances to plows, needing to be cleared every year, farmers would take them and throw them into piles in the corner of the field. John: Useless, rough stones that ca...

Texts: Psalm 19 and James 3:1-12 Summary: James makes this observation about the tongue, that it is both a blessing and a curse. We use it to both bless God, and curse others... Yet this is inconsistent. By extension James means that if we praise God, yet curse others, we are in fact cursing God. What are we truly saying about our faith? Full Text: A number of years ago, I was participating in a massed choir concert where at least one of the pieces that we would be singing was Franz Joseph Haydn’s “The Heaven’s are Telling.” Haydn’s setting is a glorious rendition of Psalm 19, as part of a larger work called “The Creation.” It is a great deal of fun to sing, particularly as part of the choir. However, I became an understudy to the lone male voice part in the trio, which had me quite nervous. I do have musical training, but solos or quartets put me front and center in a place that I don’t like to be. The time that I had sung it before, I had been simply part of the choir. I decided to ...

Text: James 2:1-26 Summary: Martin Luther hated this passage. Luther’s reading of Paul’s writings, placed the emphasis back on where it needed to be… on faith itself. But for Luther, the one passage he couldn’t get around, and the one that was frequently quoted back to him was the line from James 2:17 “Faith without works is dead.” For James, one of his great concerns was how their faith was actually being lived out. Full Text: Martin Luther hated this passage. The founder of what would become the Protestant Reformation did not like James very much. Keep in mind, this was the one who proclaimed that scripture was the only rule for faith and life, who challenged Rome’s authority of interpretation of the Bible. Luther was far more comfortable with Ephesians, saying “ For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8) The mediaeval church had developed a scheme of “works” by which one was seen to earn their way into h...

Text: Mark 7:1-8 There is a downside of being a part of a tradition that extends back thousands of years. We can become so wrapped up within the individual traditions themselves that we forget the foundation of why we do what we do. Jesus frequently locked horns with Pharisees over matters of how one expresses faith. Unfortunately, we tend to think of Pharisees as being self-righteous, overly religious folks who were more concerned with doing things right than doing the right thing. While this may be true, we often forget that Pharisees in Christ’s time were the good, church-attending folk. They were people like you and me, who did try to honour the traditions and to follow God with honesty and integrity. Yet there are times when the traditions get in the way of our relationship with God. Maybe we can hear this in a new way. In a day where hand washing and cleanliness has become even more important to us, with the threat infectious diseases… remembering the SARS crisis a few years ago,...