My Sermons

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 ...

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...