Sermon Archive

Click here to listen to this sermon! Text : John 18:33‑38a Today is Reign of Christ Sunday, the last Sunday in the church year. And on this day, we are supposed to be celebrating the reign of Christ, and the joy that entails. Sound the trumpets! Sing from the bottom of your heart! Yet in the gospel reading today, there are no trumpets, no choirs. There is not even a quiet hallelujah. We find Jesus standing before Governor Pontius Pilate; a prisoner, bound and humiliated. He awaits a horrible, suffocating death upon a bare wood cross. The only crown he will wear is one of thorns, and only stripes of office he will carry are the cruel welts from a whip. It would seem we are left with nothing to celebrate. The only thing the Gospel of John gives us to consider is the conversation between Jesus and Pilate, and Pilate’s haunting question, “What is truth?” This passage forces us to take a hard look at how we define truth, and compare it to what we find in the conversation between Jesus and P...

Click here to listen to this sermon! Text: Mark 13:1-8 Most of you know that for the past three weeks I have been running a course called “Reclaiming Revelation.” It’s an in-depth look at the last book of the Bible, which bears a rather fearsome reputation that it doesn’t really deserve. It has often been left to the fire-and-brimstone rants of fundamentalist preachers, and for far too long mainline churches have been content to let them spout off. Yet as those who have been coming to the course can tell you, Revelation is a work of art, giving an encouraging word to Christians facing persecution under the Romans in the late first century. In revealing whose really in control, and that ultimately the suffering that they face is not the final say on who they are, Revelation gave the early church the resilience it needed to survive a very dark time. Scholars call this kind of writing “Apocalyptic Literature” –and while Revelation is certainly the most famous, there are other places in th...

Click here to listen to this sermon! Text : Mark 12:38-44 The one thing about being a minister is that I have been told or have read a number of stories about how clergy and their families relate to their community. Part of it is either how they choose to relate to their community, or what their congregation or the town expects of them. Sometimes these stories are pretty funny… but at the same time they have an edge of the tragic that comes with them. My wife tells me one story from when she started in a small rural town as minister of the community’s church. Even though she used the washing and drying machines inside the manse, she was still provided a list of laundry items that were and were not allowed to be hung outside. I’ll let your imagination take care of the details, but the implication is that people in the town paid attention to what others hung on their laundry lines. Similarly, my Dad has often related stories of from his years growing up in Cape Breton about how people ca...

Text: Isaiah 2:1-4 Come Saturday morning, it will exactly eighty-eight years since the Great War in Europe ended. November 11 would become known in all the years that followed as Remembrance Day. I speak today, not so much as a minister or a theologian, but as someone who needs to remember for the sake of peace. Peace is something that we hope for, something that we long for, but it is not easy. The powerful words expressed in both Isaiah and Revelation point to that day of hope, that day of everlasting peace. Through our hope that God tugs at us to make that effort to work towards real peace. I need to remember and find new meaning in it, because I know that peace, true peace is very hard work. So today, I invite you to join me on a more personal struggle in remembering peace. You might have already noticed my change in clothes today. I know you’ve seen the black robe before… This white hood that I wear is symbolic of the bachelor’s of arts degree I received from the University of Cal...

Text: Leviticus 25:8-17 Jubilee! It’s a term that probably all of us are familiar with, or at very least we’ve heard it before. In Calgary, there’s a large concert hall called the “Jubilee Auditorium.” As a child, this was the only place I really heard the term. Whenever I heard someone mentioned about a Jubilee anniversary, I just thought they were having a big party at the Auditorium. It would only be later that someone actually had the heart to tell me that Jubilee actually meant a 50th Anniversary. “ Oh! Okay…” I would say… “Wow, fifty years?? You must be old!!” …of course, this was also before I learned what the phrase “being tactful” meant. The trouble is, many of you are probably thinking that I need to go back and actually learn what Jubilee means, because I am getting ahead of myself. After all, today we’re celebrating our 49th Anniversary as a congregation. The big five-oh is next year, and isn’t that what we call our Jubilee? Well… kind of… In many ways the word “Jubilee” ...

Texts : Mark 10:35-45 ; Job 38:1-41 At some point early on in my career, I stumbled across a saying that I try to take to heart every week when preparing sermons. It is a real caution, and a reminder of the responsibility that comes with this pulpit every week. The saying is quite simple, really… but its implications are far reaching. It goes something like this: “Beware of finding a Jesus that is entirely congenial to you. ” In other words, be careful because there is a human tendency to want to see Jesus in a way that is entirely friendly to us. Although it’s far more than just a nice, safe Jesus who seems agree that everything we do is okay in God’s eyes... that somehow Jesus fits our image, our ideas, our thoughts as to what should be, and not the other way around. Perhaps it’s better to say, beware of finding the Jesus you want to find. It has been a struggle for a very long time… wanting to essentially create or shape God in our image, instead of the other way around. One of the...

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...