Sermon Archive

Genesis 37:2ff ~ The story of Joseph and his family This Rally Sunday, we gather once more, returning from summer for what is in store. The children return to their schools once again, and parents celebrate, but sadness we feign. For now we come back to our everyday routines, back from the cottage to those familiar scenes. Today here in church, it is much the same, but hopefully we worship with renewed aim. We’ve listened to a tale, in words that are said. We heard Joseph’s story, and now we are lead To contemplate, through these words that rhyme How Joseph’s story is like yours and mine: Fathers and brothers, sisters and mothers; Me, my cats, my rabbits, and others. Grandmas and uncles, aunts and cousins; Family members by the dozens. How many people live with you? Eleven or twelve; or one or two? Joseph lived with many others. Joseph, we know, had eleven brothers! Their names were: Levi, Asher, and Dan, Judah, Gad, and Simeon. Reuben, Issachar, and Benjamin. Naphtali, and Zebulun. Bu...

When the Gospel goes to the Dogs Mark 7:24-30 In one of my Biblical research books, there is a printed warning in distinctive red letters that says “Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you.” There is a real temptation to try to create Jesus in our own image, being for us the representation of our own ideals. We tend to downplay any stories of Jesus that we might think of Jesus being unpleasant. For those who embraced the Temperance movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a flat-out denial that Jesus actually drank wine… they came up with these acrobatics explaining that it was in fact grape juice… or that the miracle at Cana wasn’t truly wine either. Others don’t like the reality that Jesus got very angry, threw stuff about, and turned over the tables over in the Temple. After all, how many of us would get away with that here? Then there is this morning’s story from Mark. The story we heard doesn’t seem to fit with the compassionate, open, loving and c...

Text : James 1:17-27 Any time that we hear from the Epistle of James, I think those of us with deep protestant roots begin to twitch. We know from history, the main voice of the protestant movement, Martin Luther, hated James with a passion. Much of Martin Luther’s cries for change had come out of observing the church abusing its power, by selling tickets to heaven… or his own personal angst of realizing that he could never truly earn God’s favour through his pious acts alone. It was our faith, not what we did that determined our end state with God. Yet when Luther would argue this in the debating forums of the church, his opponents would frequently quote James back at him. It’s not surprising that he hated it… …but 500 years later we are hopefully removed from the politics and polemics of the Reformation to actually try and see what James was trying to get at… because chances are James might personally agree with a lot of what Luther had to say… but for James it wasn’t about getting o...

Text: Ephesians 6:10-20 I have a confession to make… Not every passage in the Bible comes as a natural favourite. There are some passages that personally have to struggle with and try to come to terms with. Sometimes they are the so-called texts of terror, such as Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, sometimes they are the minutiae of the kosher laws in the depths of Leviticus, and sometimes it’s not so much as the passage itself, but in how it has been used and abused through interpretation down through the centuries. As I have learned, there is no such thing as the “plain meaning” of the text, because all of us come to a passage carrying our own personal baggage. Our experiences and understandings inform how we hear something, whether we’re aware of it or not. Sometimes, our own experiences can help us to connect to a story or passage, and quite often those same experiences can actually get in the way. For me, on a personal level, it’s the whole armour of God that comes out of Ephesian...

Text: 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14 If you had one single wish, what would that be? If God could grant you any one thing in life, what would that be? Would it be the usual suspects? Wealth? Power? Fame? I think given many of the life experiences that we have had, one wish we might have would be a chance to once again see and talked to a loved one who had died. Maybe a chance to go to a place that we have never been… maybe wish to change a painful experience in the past. There are many stories out there where people are given the chance to wish for whatever they wanted. We know the variants on the Aladdin stories that have been made into film… drawn from Mediaeval tales from the Middle-East… but even these are not as ancient as the story this morning of young Solomon… It’s funny, this is a Biblical story that we really aren’t all that familiar with, and yet all of its themes have a great resonance with us. I’m surprised that we do not tell it more than we do. It’s really a very simple story: ...

Text: Ephesians 4:25-5:2 Last week during the announcements, I eluded to the Saga of the Hot Water system in the home that Sarah and I moved into at the end of May. I think everyone goes through an experience like this at some point… but at the same time it is no less frustrating. The story goes like this. Two weeks ago, I was downstairs cleaning out the rabbit cage when I noticed a small wet spot underneath our hot water system for the house. Some of you may have heard me go on about this thing from when we moved in. It’s the latest in home heating, an on-demand hot water heater that also provides heat to the forced air part of the house. In other words… it’s a fancy, high-tech boiler that is really no bigger than the banner hanging from the front of this pulpit. Anyway, I noticed a small drip on the floor and checked it out. Maybe a pipe was sweating… but later that evening the small puddle was a lot larger, and the drips were much worse… so I took the cover off of the heating unit a...

Text: Mark 4:26-34 With moving into a new house, Sarah and I have been confronted with a new reality. We have moved from being part of a townhouse condominium complex to actually owning our own property. We now have our own lawn, small little front garden, and the freedom to do with it what we choose. Some of you might remember me commenting that when it comes to gardening, it is a skill better exercised by someone other than me. If they had a TV show on Canada’s Worst Gardener, I’d be a shoe-in. Lesley can tell you that the only plant that has managed to survive in my office is one that doesn’t really need watering. The only reason that it has lived this long is because she tends to it. But now we have our own lawn… and not just any lawn, the most sickly, pale green pathetic lawn you’ve ever seen. Right now we don’t even own a lawnmower… but this lawn has been so pathetic that we don’t need it, at least not yet. The evidence points out that this was a hastily sodded piece of land. We ...