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 →