Close your eyes, picture Mary, the mother of Jesus, maybe with baby Jesus. Have you got an image in mind?  Maybe it’s a painting you’ve seen; maybe it’s a manger creche or a sculpture.  Maybe it’s a stained glass window image.  Maybe it looks something like this. Now imagine Joseph.  Do you have an image?  It’s harder isn’t it?  Are you thinking of this guy? Read more →

Mary, how can you sing? How can you possibly sing? Poor, pregnant and unmarried, how, Mary, can you sing? How can you sing when your life’s been turned upside down? How can you sing when you know that you will always have to deal with the whispers of the so called virgin who became pregnant even before her marriage took place? Read more →

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.  Those are the words of John the Baptist, the voice of the one crying out in the wilderness.  Dressed in camel’s hair, eating an early version of the Keto diet of locusts and wild honey, if you ever wanted someone to scare you into repentance, John would have been the one. Read more →

As we begin this season of Advent, I will begin each Sunday with a story from the news that concerns our theme.  On this the first Sunday of Advent, our theme is hope.  The opposite of hope is despair.  I want to begin by reading from the Vancouver Sun this week a story of despair so that by the end of this sermon we might also understand how we can be a people of hope as an Advent people. Read more →

It’s the last Sunday of the church year, the Reign of Christ the King. I hadn’t planned to begin a sermon on the Reign of Christ by speaking about Don Cherry, but the issue fits so well, so here goes. If you live in Canada, you’d have to have been living under a rock not to know the national outrage around the comments made by Don Cherry just before Remembrance Day. Read more →

Faith is personal, but never private.  How do you react to that statement?  Are you someone who thinks that your faith is between you and God and that no one else needs to know the details or are you someone who believes that faith has a social dimension that cannot be ignored? Read more →

I remember being at a conference addressing the decline of our denomination. It seems that we’ve been having these kinds of conferences for a long time now. Read more →

Today we mark All Saints Sunday in the church calendar.  The date of All Saints is actually November 1, but most Protestant churches that celebrate All Saints mark it on the Sunday following November 1. You don’t hear a lot of sermons for All Saint’s Day in Presbyterian churches. Read more →

Stories invite us to identify with a character and parables are no different. When we hear a parable, our inclination is to identify with someone, some character, in the parable. It might be the Good Samaritan, or the Prodigal Son, but we tend to identify with someone. This morning we hear the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, and our identification seems a foregone conclusion. Read more →

We just read three scripture readings according to the lectionary. Those texts share one theme in common: God’s protection. Read more →