What would we do if we were brave? That question, raised by Rev Deborah Blood, the Executive Minister for the United Church of Christ in Maine, at the Annual Regional Meeting last year, has echoed in my head for months. Many of our churches live in fear: fear of the future, fear of not having…
You can listen to the audio here. First some back story… unlike much of our Scripture, this reading is dated carefully and precisely, in 520 BC/BCE, according to our calendar. Darius, the super-power of the day, recognized the right of the Jews to rebuild the Temple, but the Temple work languished. Haggai was utterly convinced…
A hurricane… the beginning of Intentional Interim Ministry… a federal election called… Those set beside stories from our Bible, I will touch on all of these. In the beginning, God. In the beginning, light. In the beginning, the wind from God swept over the waters of creation, creating life. The winds last week didn’t feel…
There are few stories that are more familiar than the one of David and Goliath. Even the most secular people have some sort of understanding of the story. It comes from more than three thousand years ago, but still has echoes today. Israel has come into the Promised Land and become a significant presence there. With…
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…
A handful of meal… a little oil…. Imagine those are the only foodstuffs in your kitchen… Just enough to take the edge off your hunger before you and your son lay down to die of the starvation that has been theirs since her widowhood. How many of us have faced empty cupboards and hungry children? And no means…
We all have fears… some of them rational… some of them not so rationale… Last week, you heard my story of being fearful while on a retreat at Tatamagouche Centre… an irrational fear… Fear serves a purpose. In the beginning, we were given instincts to help us survive. We had a heightened sense of our environment so that…
I am sure most people have had the experience of feeling immediately connected to someone and it was that way with Liz and me. While she had moved to Victoria not long after we met, we kept in touch through Facebook; as an insomniac, Liz would often be on-line when I got up and we…
Space! The final frontier! How many of you can complete that? I was about 8 years old when I first saw Star Trek… that would be the original series back in the 60s. I only saw it when we visited my grandparents who lived close to the Manitoba/US border… they picked up two American stations……
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