My Sermons

Preaching on the Level 16 February 2025 Jeremiah 17:5-10 Psalm 1 1 Corinthians 15:12-20 Luke 6:17-26 For a teacher, where you sit when you teach makes a big difference. For teachers of an earlier era, the correct position was up the front and up high (hmm like this, really). Teaching was literally the imparting of knowledge from on high – nowadays educationalists are more likely to observe that students and teachers are all learners together and that teachers can best inspire students by being alongside them. On the same level. Matthew and Luke both inherit this story of a sermon that sets an agenda, almost like a mission statement, relatively early in Jesus’ career. But they each do something a bit different with it. Matthew, who understands Jesus as a new Moses for a new covenant, has Jesus like the original Moses delivering his manifesto on a mountain, from on high, which is a way of saying that the Sermon on the Mount has the authority of the Law brought down by Moses from Mt Sinai...

Do's and Don'ts 11 August 2024 Ephesians 4:25-5:2 John 6:35, 41-51 A few years ago, SBS ran a series of short films on the seven deadly sins-one each on anger, sloth, gluttony, lust, envy, greed and pride. But they weren’t quite what you'd expect. The overall message, in so far as there was one, seemed to be that it is a matter of good mental health to get these things out of our system. A healthy angry outburst, for example, makes more sense than bottling it up and getting an ulcer. The film on gluttony dwelt in loving detail on the unimaginably varied appetites of its main character in a celebration of passion and pleasure until he finally ate himself into an early grave. Every film had a twist in the tale, but even as they came unstuck the characters just seemed to be doing what the rest of us secretly long to do but don't dare. Envy drove its protagonist into a lifestyle the rest of us could only-well-envy. The film on lust suggested a healthy dose of libido was n...

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, ...