December 14, 2025

In a recent gathering of local clergy with Regional Pastoral Support minister Laurie Stevenson we were guided through some Advent reflections including Joy that she symbolized as a candle in the window. Joy at Christmas, she said, is often misunderstood as constant cheerfulness yet Scripture tells a quieter truth: joy is something that comes in the morning, something that returns even after sorrow has had its time. 

That idea is based on Psalm 30:5 which says, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.“ In this verse we are reminded that seasons of sorrow and hardship are temporary, and God promises that hope, light, and lasting joy will eventually break through the darkness. It is fitting for our ongoing journey of waiting and preparing of advent toward the wonder and mystery of Christ’s birth and Christmas.

December 7, 2025

Right off the hop in this gospel lesson we hear the words, prison, and Christ, which is Greek for Messiah, in the same sentence. And I kept thinking, how can this lead us to peace? And it certainly doesn’t seem obvious. What seems to be obvious is that John the Baptist is actually very disappointed in Jesus. For example, he doesn’t appear to be handing Jesus the cup of his sadness, but rather the cup of doubt if Jesus is the one. John sounds kind of snippy. “Are you the one or should we be waiting for someone else?”
Jesus’ is response to John is to remind John about what is the work of the Messiah. Jesus says to John’s disciples tell him about what you have seen. That the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” What Jesus is saying is that’s the work of the Messiah. What Jesus hears in John’s question is not a question about healing or feeding or caring. What Jesus hears is John’s desire for power. John doesn’t need healing. John doesn’t need feeding. What John wants is power over King Herod so that he can be released from prison. 

November 30,2025

On the first Sunday of Advent, we light a candle representing ‘Hope’. We even encouraged people to tie one on for hope. But the scripture lessons would suggest that there is no hope or peace or joy and scant love in the world and I don’t see a baby making much difference. So, we have to step back, and appreciate that the first two Sundays of Advent are really about preparation. 

These Sundays challenge us to ask, how can we prepare for the birth of the Christ child in this chaos? This is an important question to ask at a time when as I said to the kids last week that our brains are on fire …..

November 23, 2025

Today is the last Sunday in a long series about how seeking a vision for what might be a new congregation and it is also Reign of Christ Sunday. These two things are related. They are related because just as Jesus is a very different kind of king, in a world that has known many kings. The church is called to be a very different organization, in a world that has known many organizations. So, if we look at why Jesus is such a different king, I think we begin to understand the kind of vision that the church ought to be about. 

November 9, 2025

On Remembrance Sunday, we remember how at the very beginning, when there is talk of war, the leaders fill the air with rhetoric of honor, glory, and the grandeur of victory. On street corners, in bars and gathering places, we sing out jubilant music of marching onto glory.

However, once the war begins and the casualties mount. The list of towns, villages, and cities that are being destroyed, and ravaged grows. In no time the attention of the masses is tuned to survival and the longing for peace again. Even the peace of surrender looks good. Next comes that movement of longing not for glory, but for those who have fought to come home. Please God let them come home alive. 

Then there is the call after the war to remember. Remember the sacrifice …….

November 2, 2025

Last week, I said that we Christians have a softer kinder perspective of first century, Jewish tax collectors, than those who were living back then and listening to Jesus’s stories. The story that we heard today is one of those that has made the difference. Now I was talking about this with Rev. Gaylyn and my desire to talk about humility as an essential part of seeking a vision to come out of the amalgamation workshops and discussion. She said it reminded her of a sermon that deeply touched her son Jacob. That sermon was by the late Rev. Timothy Keller. In that sermon, he uses one of his favorite metaphors, which emphasizes the dangers of you and me thinking that we know better than God, which he calls, ‘sitting in God’s chair.’

October 12, 2025

It is Thanksgiving weekend, and it is right and good that we should have communion on Thanksgiving weekend. I say that because in what’s called the Prayer of Thanksgiving and Consecration is an attitude of gratitude. There is thankfulness written right into the prayer at the very beginning. Remember the words, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.” and the response from the congregation is, “It is right to give our thanks and praise.” Right there at the core of our most important sacrament is thankfulness to God.

The theologian the Rev. Dr. Margit Ernst Habib says these words of the sacrament are not as solemn as they may sound and tend to characterize not just some kind of lofty Sunday morning worship feeling, but every part of Christian living. That thankfulness ought to find its way into our mundane, ordinary, trivial and everyday life. So much so that we see it as our Christian duty to show ourselves as grateful to God with our whole life.

September 28, 2025

The topic this morning is listening to the call of God for correction. In each of the readings, we have today the psalm in the call to worship, the reading from the book of Jeremiah and the gospel of Luke reading, God calls to us. In Psalm two God wants to speak through Kings. In the Jeremiah reading God speaks through a prophet to the king. And in Luke God speaks to those who act like kings. Let’s break those down because in each there is a warning and a choice.

In Psalm 2, we hear that some kings are getting together and they think that they’re strong enough to break free of the bonds that God puts on them.

September 21, 2025

Let’s listen one more time to Jeremiah’s lament: 

“My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?”

This isn’t the voice of a prophet proclaiming with conviction, it is a cry from the gut. Jeremiah is undone. He has seen his people betray the covenant, chase after false gods, turn their backs on justice – and now they are reaping the pain of exile and collapse. He looks at the wound and he cannot stop weeping. It reminds me of Jesus approaching Jerusalem and weeping for the people who did not recognize the things that would bring them peace. (Luke 19:41-44)

September 14, 2025

By the time this passage appears in the gospel of Luke Jesus has built a community of followers that include a wide variety of people within the social and religious circles of Israel. It might surprise you to know that some of those followers were Pharisees and Sadducees. You see Jesus connects with them out of a deep shared love of the faith, handed down from Abraham and Sarah through Moses, David, and all the prophets. 

Because of this, Jesus actually agrees with the Pharisees and the Sadducees about who are “the lost” of Israel. The tax collectors, the prostitutes, the criminals, those who had sickness and those who did not care for the practices of the faith. These two parables …..

September 7, 2025

A discussion about shaping of our Lives in faith

When Jeremiah went to the potter’s house, he didn’t just see a craft. He saw an extraordinary image of hope. The clay that was being turned on the wheel would rise tall and sometimes collapse in on itself. This was the image God wanted to press upon the people of Judah. If the House of Israel followed his ways, nations would rise, if they disobeyed God’s ways, nations could fall. Ultimately, there was hope that things could be repaired and mended and all would be well.

August 3, 2025

Money is great; love is better. The sermon discusses the problems presented to a rich man concerning his obsession with his riches.

June 22, 2025

Confirmation Sunday is an extraordinary day in the life of our young people, and in the life of the congregation or congregations who support them. We all get to look back at the journey that has brought us all here and ask, as we look into the future, what will each of us need as we journey forward from this point. And it’s not like we invented this reflection and projection process. It is all through the scriptures, notably we heard two of those kinds of stories this morning.

The reading from 1st Samuel today arises out of disappointment and sadness over mistakes or missed opportunities with a younger generation. The hard truth for the priest Eli, is that his sons who should have been learning how to be priests in the temple, instead were acting scandalously. They were doing the very opposite of everything that would have pleased their father. But like many a loving parent, Eli felt helpless to encourage them to make better choices. So, instead of them, the boy Samuel is brought to the temple to assist Eli and to learn how to care for the temple which was the centre of their faith. This caring also includes caring for the almost blind Eli.  Something his sons should have done.

June 15, 2025

I listened to a gentleman recently talking about visiting his adult son who was gravely ill in hospital. After several days of keeping vigil, he realized that he would need to change the way he “fathered’ his son. He said, he’d have to be more mothering. I asked what he meant by that, and he responded. “You know, hold his hand, talk to him, just let him know I’m there for him”. 

It made me think of the Father in the story read to us this morning by Tisha about the Prodigal son. It could have been called the Prodigal Sons, plural. Or even the Father of the two sons because the story really does speak of all of them even though we’re used to referring to only the one son, You know the guy, the one who runs off with his inheritance and blows it all on fancy cars, fast living and gambling, and comes to the realization one day, half-starved and living off of the scraps of the plates he was washing in the fancy restaurant that he could be doing manual labour for his Father and be better off. So why not make amends and head back home.

And of course, the son who had remained responsible and steadfast with his father’s property was furious when his no-good brother shows up and Dad hands him the Ferrari keys and leather jacket. I heard a preacher on this story say, when the Father greets his lost son, he runs to him, slippers on and bathrobe flying he’s so eager to greet him, to hold him, to shower him with love because he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to do that again. The preacher said, he ran to him like a “mother”. In the Middle East in those days, patriarchs did not run in public, certainly not appear dressed so shabbily nor show PDA’s (public displays of affection). 

June 1, 2025

The Gospel of John reading is problematic because the writer of the gospel of John can get quite circular and confusing in his explanations. 

The version you heard today was the cleaned up one from the Message translation of the Bible. In my opinion the most important line goes like this, “just as God is one in me, and I am one in you, therefore we are all one in God and God is in us.” 

The Acts reading is also problematic because the slave woman with the prophetic spirit is almost immediately forgotten. Even though it is her faithful proclamation that starts the whole story in motion. Her witness leads directly to the baptism of the jailor and his family, but she remains unnamed. But on this baptism morning it is essential that we break open these two passages because I believe they speak to the very heart of why we bother with baptism at all.

Let’s start with the story from Acts. 

May 25, 2025

I don’t know about you but most of my TV viewing these days is through streaming services like Netflix or Britbox or a sports channel.  Which usually means no commercials. But if I switch to a regular news channel, particularly news or sports, I’m always struck by how many commercials there are for pharmaceuticals. These days the popular one is Ozempic. If you have an ailment, they have a pill. Even if you don’t have a condition, they have a pill for something that you might have in the future or promise that their product will protect you from some dreaded condition. 

May 18, 2025

THE BIRTH OF THE METHODIST MOVEMENT

The Methodist movement did not grow out of some general movement like the Protestant Reformation; it began as a movement within the Church of England.  It came out of the deep religious experience and heroic labours of a group of men, the most prominent being John Wesley and his younger brother, Charles.

May 11, 2025

I was watching a comedian that could easily have been a preacher. He said you know in life we only really have two problems. Are you healthy or are you sick. If you’re healthy, you have no problem but if you’re sick, you have two problems. And they are, am I gonna get better or am I gonna die. If you get better then you’ve got no problem But, if you’re gonna die, you got two problems. You’re either gonna go to heaven or you are  gonna go to hell. If you go to heaven, you got no problems. But if you go to hell, you’ve only got two problems. Are you going to be original or extra crispy?

May 4, 2025

  I invite you to consider the following unplanned encounter with nature. It’s after dinner on a warm spring evening. The sun has set and soon stars will be twinkling in the sky. On the drive back home from a wonderful day by the lake, fields pass by on either side. In the distance there is a light from an approaching car. A large deer suddenly appears, damaging your vehicle. The deer is seriously injured. Standing by the driver’s door, you are visibly distraught while also feeling grateful that no one in the car was injured. As a result of this encounter, you decide to change how you drive on that stretch of road in the future. Maybe you drive a little slower or drive a little more attentively while watching out for deer warning signs. Changes intentionally occur.

April 27, 2025

Poor Thomas gets a bad rap. He is always being called Doubting Thomas. But he isn’t alone in doubt. In fact, he is just the last and a long line of doubters. Let’s break it down. Last week on Easter Sunday we heard that Peter was the first doubter. He looks in the empty tomb, and where the grave clothes have been set and yet he does not understand. OK, not understanding isn’t really the same as doubt, but he certainly doesn’t believe that Jesus has risen.