My Sermons

Third Sunday of Easter, 2026 Readings Psalm 100 Acts 2:14a, 36-41 Luke 24:13-35 A colleague who found he had his best sermon ideas while walking his dog was once given a gift by his family – a little paper-weight with the words engraved on it, solvitur ambulando, ‘it will be solved in the walking’. It’s a phrase first used by the 4th century BC Greek philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope, as a clever comeback against a rival philosopher. Like many preachers before him, my friend had discovered that what we think we don’t have sometimes comes to us fully formed along the way. The important thing is to keep moving, because it’s movement, not stagnation, that stimulates creativity. As another old saying puts it, to travel with hope may often be better than arriving at journey’s end. But, in today’s reading from St Luke’s Gospel, two pilgrims find themselves on a very different kind of journey. Exhausted and depressed by the despairing events of Passover Week, it seems Cleopas and his companio...

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 powe...

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 secret, that human experi...

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 faiths a...

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 thinking about this whole ...

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 preaching about th...

12 October 2025 Readings Jeremiah 29.1, 4-7 Psalm 111 Luke 17.11-19 May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts, be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our Rock and our Redeemer. The universe is, of course, a very strange place - and people who live in it quite often feel bewildered and off balance. Nowhere is this unsurprising fact better illustrated than in the 1978 instant hit radio play cum novel, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, in which Earthling Arthur Dent is rescued by an undercover alien and whisked aboard a Vogon destructor starship moments before his planet is due to be demolished to make way for an intergalactic hyperspace bypass. Arthur, who had just stepped out of the shower, is thrust into the bewildering and fantastical cosmos wearing nothing but his dressing gown and carrying a bath towel - which actually turns out to be very useful - and he spends the rest of the story being very surprised and trying to catch up. Apart from being a master...

14 September 2025 Readings Jeremiah 4.11-12, 22-28 ps 14 1 Timothy 1.1-2, 12-19a Luke 15.1-10 I was reminded, when I looked at the readings the lectionary gives us for this week, that the wider Church in Australia - the Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican and Uniting Churches - observe every September as the Season of Creation. This month, the reflection is on God’s beauty and goodness reflected in the natural world, and on the human vocation to love and care for all that God has made. And it’s in this context that the late Pope Francis observes, in his confronting and groundbreaking 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si - that everything in the human and natural worlds is connected. As Genesis informs us, human life is interwoven and inseparable from the web of creation, which God also blesses, and on which all life depends. And when we ignore that, then, as the Pope puts it in his blunt encyclical, ‘We are broken’. Pope Francis points to the multiple ecological crises affecting our modern world, and...

20 July 2025 Luke 10.38-42 I’ve heard it said that the true heart of a home and the centre of household activity is the kitchen. Maybe that was even more true in the olden days where the kitchen table was where families would eat together, and the kitchen was where stories would be told and the important events of the day discussed. The kitchen was - and maybe still is - the room of the house where people are both busy and relaxed at the same time, where homework and phone calls compete with potatoes to be peeled and dishes to be washed. The kitchen - at least in the house where I grew up, was where the really important business of the family happened. When I was growing up in WA, houses also used to have verandahs, semi-public shaded areas at the front of houses where kids could play and old people could sit, where you could read the newspaper and still see what was going on in the street and pass the time of day with passers-by. The verandah was where private space intersected with...

Casting out Demons 22 June 2025 Proper 7C 1 Kings 19.1-4, 8-15a ps 42 Luke 8.26-39 It’s heartening that even in dark and anxious times - like the times we are currently living through - you still sometimes get glimpses of how things should be. Maybe you came across this before I did - but just yesterday I heard of a movement spreading across Instagram called ‘New Evangelicalism’. A heavily tattooed former pastor who rejoices in the name of Brian Recker is spreading the message that Evangelical churches in the US have been hijacked by the far right’s rhetoric of exclusion and hate, hijacked to the extent that many churches in the US have become little more than barrackers for the boorish and divisive politics of Donald Trump. Jesus - Brian Recker says - is not about exclusion, not about deportation and attacking social cohesion and supporting genocide and lining the pockets of dictators - but about love. About building up, about being for others, not against ot...

Trinity Sunday Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 Psalm 8 Romans 5:1-5 John 16:12-15 One of the risks of following a faith that is as old as ours - two thousand years and counting - is that along the way, lots of stuff gets set in stone as immutable doctrine. And passed down as ideas about God that other people came up with centuries ago and argued and fought over until finally they achieved the musty sanctity of extreme age. The even greater risk is that we can lose sight of the fact that as Christians we daily experience God for ourselves - and are called to reimagine and express our knowledge and love of God in the shapes and colours and movements of an ever-changing world. The 1600-year-old notion of God as a Trinity is a prime example. A doctrine that was hammered out in passionate disagreements and much bloodshed over centuries into an uneasy compromise at the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451; and which preachers, once a year, are still invited to explain. Well, it can’t be ...

Easter Day Luke 24:1-12 So the women came running in with a story that Jesus was risen. Admittedly, the story must have been a bit garbled. It’s not that they’ve seen him, they’ve seen, more to the point, where he isn’t. The stone rolled away – more, I imagine, to allow the women to see the evidence of where Jesus wasn’t, than as a means of exit for the Risen One himself who, as the following days will reveal, has become remarkably good at sudden entrances and exits. They’ve seen where Jesus isn’t – the empty tomb which all four gospels emphasise as the ground zero of resurrection faith. Something has happened here. They’ve seen where Jesus isn’t, and they’ve heard some startling news. Two messengers in white, Luke wants us to notice, probably because in the law of the land at the time, two witnesses make a case. But the apostles, the ones on whom it all depends now, the founding fathers of our faith, aren’t having a bar of it. Hysterical nonsense, wishful thinking. There’s a ...