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...

Sunday 23 June 2024 Job 38:1-11 Mark 4.35-41 On my phone I have an app called Weatherzone, that tells you what the weather is likely to be up to 10 days ahead - with the cute little sunny faces and fluffy clouds and little diagonal lines for rain. Wind, hail, storm, all represented with cute little emojis that somehow don’t quite do justice to the powerful reality of hot and cold and sunshine and storm that we simply have to plan our lives around! It’s no accident, I think, that we use meteorological terms to describe all of the most powerful influences on our lives - from saving for a rainy day to navigating the choppy waters of an unstable economy or a failing relationship. In the ancient world, one of the most powerful symbols of anxiety and disorder was the chaos of a storm at sea. At sea, you were in the power of forces almost too big to imagine, the violence of wind and waves was so feared that creation itself was supposed to be the result of divine forces holding back the unimag...

2 June 2024 Second Sunday after Pentecost 1 Samuel 3.1-10 Psalm 139.1-7,15-18 2 Corinthians 4.5-12 Mark 2.23-3.6 I remember once as a small boy staying over at my friend’s house, being asked to help set the table. “Just put this in the centre of the table, Evan”, said my friend’s mum. But it was a crystal bowl, it looked and felt precious, and I - felt so clumsy. I must have looked doubtful, because she said to me, “It’s OK. Just walk slowly.” And I carried it very carefully indeed - the bowl that was so delicate and that caught the light so beautifully. But the bowl and I both survived! It felt like a great trust had been placed in me - and a massive relief to get it safely to the table. After dinner, I stuck to the knives and forks! So today’s lessons are for ordinary, imperfect human beings who know they drop things, and get things wrong, and that they don’t quite measure up to the task of being servants of the light. Ordinary human beings - who respond to God’s calling in ordinar...

  Trinity Sunday Isa 6.1-8 Rom 8.12-17 Mark 1.9-11 So, it’s Trinity Sunday - a day on which traditionally the Church reflects on no less than the nature of God’s own life. On how Jesus as the eternal Word of God is a co-equal person of the Godhead and how the Holy Spirit as the mutual self-gifting love of Father and Son spills over in loving gift to all creation. To spill the beans on all that in a 15 minute sermon without committing any of the enticing but deadly heresies of the ancient Church. I’ve heard it suggested that Trinity Sunday is also the one day of the year on which your hardworking preacher is most likely to call in sick! Well, what if we forget the tricky theological formulas the Church has wrestled with for two millenia and ask ourselves, seriously, how do I personally imagine God? What picture comes to your mind when you think of God?  I remember once asking members of a parish study group to draw something that summed up what God “looked like” to them. Well, ...

Fifth Sunday of Easter 5 May 2024 One of the fables attributed to the 6th century BC Greek philosopher Aesop is about three lazy brothers who inherited a vineyard - along with a note from Dad claiming he had buried a treasure in gold amongst the vines. For years they dug diligently around the roots of the vines - never unearthing any gold but to their surprise producing better and better wine year after year.  Remember from last week? I’m the vine, Jesus tells us, and you are the branches. Your job is to abide in me because through me you have life. You need to hold on, and you need to be fruitful. If you are not being fruitful, then the life of the vine is not flowing through you and you have already separated yourself from the source of life. If you are being fruitful and you want to keep being fruitful - well then you need to submit to being pruned and shaped and disciplined by my love.  This is Jesus in truth-telling mode, it is the hard news of accountability - and it’s s...

 Sunday 28 April 2024 1 John 4.7-21 John 15.1-8 Many years ago I had a bad experience with pruning.  What made it worse, was it wasn’t my tree, it was at a place I was working.  ‘We just need to lop a couple of those over-hanging branches’, I suggested – trouble is, when I lopped them off it was obvious I needed to take a bit off on the other side to match.  Then it looked ridiculous because the side branches were short but it went straight up in the middle, so I had to get a step-ladder – every attempt to make it look symmetrical meant I had to take a bit more off somewhere else - by the end of the morning the damage was done.  All that was left was a couple of bare branches, and a solitary leaf.   Pruning isn’t a job for the faint-hearted.  It’s a job for realists, for people who know that a living thing needs to be able to direct its energies into areas of new growth, that dead and dying wood needs to be amputated and growth needs to be encoura...