My Sermons

28 July 2024 Ephesians 3.14-21 John 6.1-21 When we were kids, I remember Mum sending me and my older sister off to school every morning with a packed lunchbox. Usually sandwiches, with whatever we had asked for by way of filling. In my case that usually meant my go-to fave - tomato sandwiches! What Mum didn’t know - or, maybe she did? - was that that was just the start of the lunchtime economy at Wilson Park Primary School. Once lunchboxes got open, and my mates Robbie Gamble and Michael Stanley and I saw what we had all got, that was when the trading began - Michael Stanley usually had Vegemite, and what's more, his mum let him have white bread! So we shared - and of course we all had enough. Which of course brings us to the Gospel reading and the great miracle of the crowd that all gets enough to eat. The crowds, in the Gospel stories, are always ordinary people, people who have nothing - who paradoxically all through the Bible are the ones best able to experience th...

7 July 2024 2 Corinthians 12.2-10 Mark 6.1-13 Have you ever felt not quite good enough? Maybe for that job you really wanted to succeed in even even though on the inside you weren’t quite sure you knew what you were doing? Maybe as a new mum or dad, when deep down you wished you knew what to do with this wriggling, unbearably loud, vulnerable little being that depended utterly on you? Maybe just in general, when everybody else around you seemed competent and sure of themselves and you just - weren’t? The truth of course is that we’ve all been there. We all want to succeed at the things that are important to us, we all want to be accepted - yet deep down, there’s all too often the nagging feeling we’re not quite up to it. Which brings me to the topic for today’s sermon – the all-too human tension between our dreams of success and the realities of weakness and vulnerability. Paul’s ministry to the church in Corinth was a pretty good example of this contradiction. A major seap...