My Sermons

 Fourth Sunday in Lent Readings ps 23 Ephesians 5.8-14 John 9.1-41 “What did I do wrong, that I deserved this bad luck!” Do you ever find yourself saying, or maybe even just thinking, this? Or maybe saying to a friend, when they have some unexpected good fortune, or narrowly avoid some pitfall, “Somebody up there must like you!” It’s as old as the hills, isn’t it, the idea that, spiritually speaking, what goes around, comes around. That we get our just desserts, and it comes from the age-old view of God as the ultimate keeper and settler of scores. In this view of things, which Jesus thoroughly debunks in today’s reading from the Fourth Gospel, if somebody is struck by misfortune then it just shows God disapproves of them. And on the other side of the ledger, if we’re doing OK thank you very much, then it shows God approves of us. It’s wrong, of course. Not only does it lead to victim-blaming, it also provides a too easy self-justification for the comfortable, and the rich and the...

 Last Sunday before Lent, 2026 Readings Exodus 24.12-18 Ps 2 Matthew 17.1-9 In the 1979 movie, A Picnic at Hanging Rock , a group of schoolgirls with their lady teachers all dressed up in dreamy period costumes disappear on a school outing on Valentine’s Day 1900.  It’s a powerful and timeless movie, with its finely balanced portrayal of the tensions and unspoken understandings between the characters, the hints of impropriety, special friendships and hostilities; contradictions sharpened by the awkward imagery of pretty crinoline dresses clambering up a granite outcrop in the middle of the Victorian Alps, claustrophobic scenes of lost girls clawing through spiky undergrowth - and pervading the movie the dizzying emptiness of the Australian bush.  I guess the brooding uneasiness of the movie mirrors the ambivalence and barely suppressed fear of the Australian bush felt by early white settlers.  We get the sense that the mountain itself is protecting some sort of secre...

 2nd Sunday after Epiphany, 2026 Readings Isaiah 49.1-7 Ps 40.1-14 1 Corinthians 1.1-9 John 1.29-42 I sometimes wonder what it would take for us to really believe, and to experience for ourselves, that Jesus is the light that shines in the darkness of our world, or as John the Baptist puts it in today’s reading, the lamb of God who takes away the world’s sin? What would it take, in other words, for us to live without anxiety, experiencing the world we live in as being centred on and shaped every moment by the reality of reconciling love? And knowing deep down that because the love that created all things is capable of transforming the limitations of our lives, not even our most fearful circumstances are capable of overwhelming us or holding us captive? And I wonder about this, in part, because the fearful and violent acts we have witnessed in our own country over the last few weeks expose a deep anxiety in our national psyche, and a sense that our cohesion as a country of many fai...

 Christmas 2026 Readings Isaiah 52.7-10 Hebrews 1.1-4 Luke 2.1-20 A few years ago I was struck by an item in the news just before Christmas. It was a tongue in cheek article in the Business section of the daily paper reporting on one of the greatest brand competitions of recent times – Jesus vs. Santa Claus. Well, the surprising thing wasn’t actually that Santa is outselling Jesus by a factor of about a hundred - after all, it’s hard to beat the marketing strategy of a fat guy in a red suit who can persuade you to punish your credit card by pretending to fly around the whole world in a single night, giving everybody exactly what they want – the truly surprising thing about the article that seemed to utterly flabbergast the writer – was that Jesus seemed to be catching up.  Fast.  Nativity scenes still have a long way to go before they’re as popular as Santa’s grotto – but according to this economist, religion’s making a comeback at the checkout.   So I started t...

 16 November 2025 Readings Isaiah 65.17-25 Song of Isaiah Luke 21.5-19 In my humble opinion, the best-known and most widely quoted preacher Australia has ever known is Arthur Malcolm Stace - an illiterate WWI soldier, petty criminal and alcoholic.  You might not even know the name. Maybe it will help if I also say that Stace is also Australia’s earliest, greatest and most prolific graffiti artist ever.  Because Arthur Stace wrote the word ‘Eternity’ in flowing letters in chalk on the pavements of Sydney over half a million times between 1932 and his retirement in 1960. And on New Year’s Day 2000, Stace’s one-word sermon was immortalised by being reproduced in full – in letters a hundred metres high –in lights on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and surrounded by fireworks – which made Stace also the Australian preacher whose sermons have reached the widest audience ever, and certainly the only Australian preacher whose collected works most of us know off by heart. Stace was prea...