Joseph

Matthew 1:18-25 We don’t hear very much about Joseph in the Christmas story.

Full of grace and truth

John 1:6-18 We have seen his glory, full of grace and truth. John, using the imagery of light in the darkness to speak of the arrival of Jesus I must have read or listened to these words dozens and dozens of times – every Christmas of my life, to begin with, and I’m sure plenty […]

Christ the King

Psalm 46 | Colossians 1:11-20 Today we come to the end of the Church year. Next Sunday, is the start of advent, the start of the time of getting ready, as we approach the great mystery of Christmas. This week, the final Sunday of the Church year, we celebrate the festival of Christ the King.

Celebrating connections

Isaiah 65:17-25 We’re drawing close to that time of year when we start to look towards Christmas; to the season of advent, when we will be preparing ourselves once again for our celebration of that most incredible of all miracles and mysteries, the coming of God into God’s world, not through a spectacular act of […]

How Long?

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4, 3:1-2 Habakkuk is quite unusual amongst the prophets of the day – not unique, but unusual – in his approach to the suffering that he saw around him.

The days are surely coming

Jeremiah 31:27-34 One more week in the book of Jeremiah. Last week we reflected on Jeremiah’s words to those who had been taken into exile, those for whom everything had changed so dramatically, who were wondering what it meant, how they were supposed to live now that they were in this foreign land, the land […]

Live where you are

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been spending some not inconsiderable amount of time thinking about where we should go next in terms of our sermon series. Since Pentecost, back in June, we’ve explored once again what it means to be followers of Jesus – empowered by the Spirit, following in the freedom we […]

Hope for all creation

Romans 8:18-25 Today we come to the end of our series for the Season of Creation, and we’re deviating from the principle that I set out at the start of the series, when I spoke about the challenge of taking the lectionary readings and trying to hear the voice of creation in texts where we […]

Listen to the voice of creation

Jeremiah 4:22-28 | Luke 15:1-10 There are, I think, three outstanding difficulties that we have when it comes to reading the Bible. The first, and perhaps the greatest of them is resistance. By resistance I mean that often we know exactly what the scriptures are telling us about the will and the ways of God, […]

Humility for the win

Luke 14:1, 7-14 This week Sureka I will be celebrating our twenty fifth wedding anniversary. Now while many of the details of the preparations for the wedding have faded into the midst of time (actually, I managed to avoid much of the planning by the cunning strategy of still being in England when decisions had […]

Prioritise People

Luke 13:10-17 Within the Judaism of Jesus’ day many debates raged around the correct interpretation and application of the law of Moses. I think it’s important to start with that truth, because there is a common human tendency to view those who are different from us as if they were undifferentiated, while seeing our own […]

Focussed on Jesus

Hebrews 11:29-12:2 Hebrews chapter 11 contains one of my favourite verses in the whole of the Bible. “By faith,” it reads, “they were sawn in two”. Now I don’t know about you, but when I think of the rewards of the life of faith, I tend to think of things a little bit less, well, […]

Justice not Religion

Isaiah 1:1-20 The book of the prophet Isaiah begins by jumping full on into a tirade against the people of the day.

A Prayer for Followers

Colossians 1:1-14 I’ve heard it said that we in the Uniting Church don’t read the Epistles very much. By contrast with more evangelical traditions, I suspect there’s truth in this: that we have a fairly strong tendency to favour the gospel passages from the lectionary. And I’m not suggesting that that’s a bad thing. I […]

Followers who make followers

Luke 10:1-11 Last week, looking at the end of Luke Chapter 9, we had a series of interactions between Jesus and potential followers in which, as we reflected, Jesus didn’t go out of his way to make it easy. He warned one man that following him might mean not even have a fox’s hole to […]