Sermon Archive

This Sunday's sermon was written and delivered by Elder Siem Vandenbroek. Johnny Cash sang with a deep, resonating voice. One of his songs was “A boy named Sue”. The man in black, as he was called, would take his guitar and give a grand solo performance that had quite a following. The song, “A boy named Sue”, deals with our topic: What is in the name? Well, the problem is that Sue is a nice name for your daughter, but not a proper name for your son. This father wanted to be on purpose nasty to his son and named him Sue, knowing full well that this would make him somewhat of a laughing stock for his classmates and boys on the street. The song goes way back to the 60’s and 70’s, to the more restricted ideas of that time, at which we would look now somewhat differently today. At that time this boy had to live with the name Sue and indeed, as the song spells out, he was made the joke of the neighbourhood. But then he learned to live with the disadvantage and started to fig...

Text: Matthew 6:1-13 What exactly is prayer anyway? It is such a central part of our spirituality as Christians, and yet I would venture to say that most of us don’t really know what it is… At it’s heart we say that prayer is talking with God… yet how many of us get very uncomfortable when someone asks us to pray to open a meeting? Chance are we tend to ask either the minister, or those who outwardly seems to be a lot more comfortable with saying the right words of a prayer than we are. Although I will say, given the stock market rollercoaster over the past week, prayer may have been a bit more on people’s mind… and flowed a bit more easily… but let’s be honest. It’s easier to get the minister to do it. This really came into sharp focus for me in the very first year that I was ordained… serving as an associate minister at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Cornwall. Within the first month of my arrival, I was invited over to a dinner at the home of one of the congregation’s matriarchs. ...

Text: Exodus 14:19-31 – The Crossing of the Red Sea Note: Earlier in the service, a film clip showing the crossing of the Red Sea scene from the film the Prince of Egypt was shown. My comments presume that people had seen the scene. I have to admit; in my opinion the scene of the crossing of the Red Sea in the Prince of Egypt blows any previous film to cover the subject out of the water. Sure, it’s an animated film… but in that way it can do and capture things that live action films can’t… like keeping that sense of wonder and mystery as part of it. Maybe that’s why I personally enjoyed it so much. I remember seeing this for the first time when it was released in 1998, and a few people said after walking out of the theatre, a few people joked “so who is Charleton Heston anyway?” A few weeks ago, we met Moses as the reluctant shepherd living in exile. We have come a long way since then. Now all the people of Israel are gathered at the shore, at the edge of the sea… caught between certai...

Text : Matthew 18:15-20 I have a relative who infuriates me sometimes when it comes to matters of faith. She’s not terribly keen on acknowledging anybody around her in worship. Even when passing the offering plate around or the bread for community, she avoids eye contact when at all possible. God forbid if she actually has to look at the person next to her, much less acknowledge that someone else is in the sanctuary. “The service is about me and God” she says… and anything that gets in the way of that is to be avoided all cost. People coughing, children crying or talking, usually evokes a dirty look. “Me and God” –that’s it. Nobody else matters. Yet it’s not really her fault. It’s how she was raised… generations of people who have been taught that our faith is exclusively between ourselves and God. It’s entirely personal, and it’s going to stay that way. The individualism that we have been raised and take for granted has only been a dominant part of our society since the 1700s. It’s no...

Text: Exodus 3:1-15; 4:1-17 “You’ve chosen the wrong messenger! Send someone else…” Wow… what a letdown! After all this, all Moses can says is, “Please Lord, send somebody else!” We find ourselves at the end of one of the most profound stories from Hebrew Scripture. It is the tale of a wandering shepherd who comes face to face with the living God, and then sets out on a mission to free the Slaves of Egypt. It is a powerful story –so powerful that it has been brought to the big screen on three different occasions… one of which we saw a clip of this morning. It is so powerful, in fact, that we use one of its images to give a brand logo for our denomination. The burning bush, along with the Latin phrase Nec Tamen Consumebateur, can be found at the front of most sanctuaries in the Presbyterian Church in Canada… on fire and yet not consumed. It is the primary image on this pulpit and on our largest stained-glass window… and has been the main design element for both our website and the styli...

Text : Exodus 1:8-2:10 I’m grateful that you are here this morning, given the competition we have from the closing ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing. I caught the opening moments of the ceremony, and I have to say that I couldn’t help but marvel at the scale of the production. It’s huge… literally a cast of thousands… and of course, from the land and people that invented fireworks, they’re telling their story on an epic scale. It’s an interesting comparison as we worship today, in our rather humble surroundings. But the story that we tell today is one we know… we have the opening notes of the book of Exodus… the original big-budget epic. Even though some of the stories from Genesis have a cosmic scale to them, Exodus has all of the themes that really makes it work. There will be spectacular special-effects, there will be a cast of thousands, there will be a sweeping that tells of the forging of a new nation, there will be the cry for freedom answered by the living God. But notice w...

Text: Isaiah 56:1; 6-8 One of the biggest challenges of being the church today is that we no longer hold the social status we once did. To be honest, I don’t think that is such a bad thing, but at the same time there are many of us who have living memories of the church in its heyday. What’s more, fond memory is always better than living reality, so we do tend to tell the good stories, and downplay the bad. I think it’s human nature… But at the same time, the type of thinking that “then” is somehow better than “now” can be crippling. Isaiah’s words were delivered to a people who had very much fallen into that kind of a trap… and I can’t help but think that we have a lot more in common When this congregation was founded in 1957, Canada was in the midst of a population explosion, new communities were springing up, and new churches were appearing along with them. Churches were social community centers, and important places for networking and social interaction… It wasn’t a question of if ...