The Armour of God

Tender. Passionate. Strong. Compassionate. Words that we could use to describe Jesus. They are also words I would use to describe Wonder Woman as she is portrayed in the movie. Here is a brief synopsis of it: Before she was Wonder Woman, she was Diana, princess of the Amazons, daughter of Hippolyta, who told her that…

What’s Your F Word? Fun

This is a dialogue amongst the members of the Executive Circle, how are explaining, in a humourous way, how the new governance model works. We are sitting on the chancel, in a semi-circle, as if we were at coffee time. Bill: I’d like to talk about the Idea Board Christine: Me too, it looks really…

What’s Your F Word: Family & Friendship

Family and friendship are my F words for today. How do we create healthy families and networks of friends? How do we live with respect in creation? How we share? That passage from Acts is one of my favourite parts of the Bible. A model of how the first followers of Jesus lived. Sharing, caring, and…

What’s Your F Word: Friction

Despite the fact that I was appointed to this pastoral charge as your Interim Minister after some conflict, NOBODY wanted to share a faith story about friction!  Is it because conflict is such a taboo subject in the church that we think that ‘good Christians’ don’t have conflict? Our reading from Matthew this week…

What’s Your F Word: Faith

Imagine the first Pentecost… That fearful band of followers of Jesus. Their beloved leader who was put to death, rose three days later and spent the next 50 days seemingly popping in and out of situations, still preaching, teaching and healing. And then he ascended into heaven. Gone away again. And then there was Pentecost… the day when the…

Who Wants to Get Stoned?

  People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. A rolling stone gathers no moss. The only difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is the way you use them. There is no end to quotes about stones. How many of you were scratching your head at the sign this week? Gary was a bit skeptical when I told…

Courage for Resurrection

The seeds of my reflection this morning were sown by an article entitled An Upside Down Easter Meditation by Parker Palmer. You can find it here. I attended the funeral of a young woman Thursday afternoon, a good friend of my daughter-in-law and my oldest granddaughter’s godmother. Beth was 39 when she died… she had had breast…

Water Is Life

A number of years ago, I was playing in a ball tournament in New Minas, it was the hottest weekend of the year, blazing sun, there’s a distinct lack of trees on a ball field. There was some humidity and of course, we are all sweating. We were sponsored by Pepsi, so there was LOTS…

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

I created a video of images, both old and current of First Nations people and played it before I started to preach. Some of those are pretty powerful images given what we know about our history with First Nations people. They cast light on history that we probably would rather not know. And yet, we…