The Preachers’ Table
Preaching is a communal, multi-layered act; listening, reading, writing, proclaiming, absorbing. This is a place for us to share our preparations for our sermons. Share your first impressions, new discoveries, old favourites, burning questions. This is a place for preachers and listeners alike, to prepare our hearts and minds for the Word.
Time for dinner! Mark 3:20-35
Jesus’s mother always knows that Jesus is the Messiah. Could it be that Jesus’s family is not jealous of the time he is spending with the crowds, but genuinely afraid for Him, his safety, maybe even His sanity? Continue reading
Easter 7: the ones who were given
Just try understanding yourself as a gift the Father has given to the Son and vice-versa for a second. A precious heirloom given and given again as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace of intra-trinitarian love. Usually when we think of gifts given by God we think of vertical variety: stuff coming down to us. But this horizontal transaction suggests something about the nature of the economy of the trinity which should fascinate and tantalize us. Continue reading
Acts 8.26-40 : do we have anything to share?
When did we give up on the idea that Christianity has something to offer to the society we live in? Do we believe the good news has anything to offer to the overstressed, the unjustly oppressed, the fragile marriage, the scared student? If we truly believed it, wouldn’t we share it? Continue reading
Resurrection commune-ism?
Is it possible that it was exactly the power of the Spirit that enabled communalism where “No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common?” Continue reading
Branches and coats: Palm Sunday 2015
If you prepare the liturgy well, there is no need to preach, except to draw people’s focus to the liturgy. Continue reading
Choices
In these readings for Lent 5 I see story of choices, laid out for us. God chooses covenant. God chooses death and resurrection. God, clearly, chooses us.
The immensity of that is really more than I can get my head around. Continue reading
Lent 4 – The cruciform church
Preach Christ crucified. Preach also the church crucified and resurrected by God’s grace. For it is only when we conform the Church to the image of the True Cross that we can, with Jesus, be lifted up. Continue reading
Into resurrection kicking and screaming
It is interesting that Jesus says quite openly that he will not only be arrested and killed, but that he will also rise again. And yet, Peter still tries to stop it. Continue reading
Last Sunday of Epiphany – Things Transfigured and not Transfigured
The truth is that we don’t know why God shows himself in great glory to some people and not to others, but we do know that there is nothing we can do to cause or earn such encounters. They happen or they don’t. And sermons which make people feel guilty or in any way inadequate because they don’t should be avoided at all cost. So should sermons that attempt to recreate the Jesus light. Instead, we should focus on what we can affect, which is not what we see, but how we see it. Continue reading
Epiphany 5 – Let’s go to the neighbours?
It is proper that congregations, vestries, and clergies are concerned with what happens here. But it seems that Jesus’ sense of his place and his purpose in the mission of God was more than just having a satisfactory local ministry (here). As we follow Jesus will we also take responsibility to “proclaim the message ‘there’ also”? Continue reading
