Sermons on Church's Year (Page 5)

Lessons and Carols

Well, it’s not exactly a sermon but the lessons and carols speak for themselves.

Good News Hunting

When I was a kid I loved the puzzles where you have to see how many umbrellas or chipmunks or words you can find hidden in the picture. I was reminded of this by this morning’s gospel which ends with the words, “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” It left me wondering where exactly the good news is hiding in this account of John’s preaching. It seems that he was mainly talking about…

Make Space for God

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on unsplash.com If you’re about the same age as me, this gospel reading with its quotation from Isaiah immediately brings to mind the beginning of Godspell with its haunting “Prepare the Way of the Lord.”  Yet I wonder why the Lord needs the way prepared. Yesterday, members of the altar guild cleaned all our sacred pots and pans in preparation for Christmas. We do this two or three times a year – before the two big…

Raise your Head

Luke 21:25-36 There are two quite different ways of looking at this week’s Gospel. One is that terrible things are going to happen and we should be prepared less we be trapped; and the second is that actually terrible things happening means that redemption and God’s reign are very near and we should be hopefully expectant. Looking at this textually, the ambiguity seems to come from the fact that we are reading Luke’s gospel.  Both Luke and Matthew took Mark’s…

The Reign of Christ

Revelation 1:4b-8 John 18:33-37 I am glad to be home after a rapid visit to my family in the UK. Of course, one person I did not see was my brother Richard who died quite a while back. Every Christmas, Richard faithfully sent out a Christmas letter with the normal kind of information about his family’s activities.  But Richard was not an optimist. Every year he told us that things were so bad that the end of the world was…

Even though you die, you live

Photo by Dawid-Zawila on Unsplash John 11:32-44 The gospel about Lazarus that we just heard is far too short. John’s narrative starts several verses earlier and is important because the raising of Lazarus cannot, I think, be separated from the teaching about the resurrection and life which precedes it. But there is another perhaps more significant problem. Why was Jesus greatly disturbed in spirit? Jesus was in another place when Lazarus became sick. Bethany is very near Jerusalem, and, apparently,…

St. Benedict

The Fall of the Roman Empire is usually dated to 476 when the Roman Emperor was deposed by Odoacer who was probably from one of East German peoples. Benedict was born just four years later in 480. Although we talk about the Fall of the Roman Empire it was not something that happened overnight – there was a prolonged period of unrest and uncertainty both before and after 476. It was a time of massive migrations in Europe; groups of…

St. Francis

Photo by Taneli Lahtinen on Unsplash Today we complete the Season of Creation as we celebrate the feast of St. Francis. As a young man, Francis rejected his wealthy family and took seriously, and literally, Jesus’ instruction to his disciples to take nothing extra for the journey when he sent them into the villages to preach.  He began his ministry in 1209, wearing the clothes of a peasant and preaching repentance. Soon others joined him, and they lived in a deserted leper colony…

Trinity

Many of you know that I enjoy playing golf. Some golfers spend a lot of time thinking about their shot before they hit the ball. They think about how far the green is, which way the wind is blowing, which club they should use, how high their tee is, which leg is carrying the most weight and so on. Me, I skip most of that, put the ball down and hit it in the general direction of the hole. After…