John’s baptism is tricky to preach on. On the one hand, he’s a fiery preacher who makes stark the need for transformation in a dark world. On the other hand, he sounds awfully judgmental and ‘works-based’ (especially in Lutheran contexts). Well, if we can contextualise John’s actions and practices to his own time and place without overlaying our own fears…
I had the honour of preaching the Christmas Day message this morning at Trinity Lutheran Church. John happens to be my favourite gospel, for all it’s imagery and poetry. John 1 especially because it takes the human Jesus we see the night before to a cosmic Christ in the bright light of day. This Word was spoken at creation, at…
I had the honour of preaching my first intern sermon at Trinity Lutheran Church yesterday on Advent 1. The lectionary reading was Luke 21:25-36 — the end of the world. It’s a nice and easy introduction to preaching, right? I shared a fragment of my own story around the End Times and a couple of ways such theology was used…
How many of us can resonate being raised to believe in an angry God? Oh sure, God’s anger and wrath were justified because of our (apparent) sin and God couldn’t be in the presence of sin (despite being all-powerful somehow). How many of us kept asking: “If God really hates us that badly, why does God bother creating us in…
Today’s gospel reading was taken from Matthew 11: 16 “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 17 ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ 18 For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a…
We speak so many words over ourselves — true, false, and a pasty mixture; necessary, unnecessary, and a quagmire of both. It’s not hard to begin to see why we step into the stereotypes we tell one another. We pronounce so many realities on ourselves — realities that sicken and kill us, take power over others, and distort who we…
Where do you look to for help? When real life demands to be lived, a chirpy Psalm might seem a bit shallow to turn to. What’s the use in saying God will keep us from all evil when death and evil clearly still impacts our daily lives? What is the Psalmist trying to say? What hope is there in celebrating…
This past week at seminary was fascinating: we were given a text to dig into (pulling out verbs); we then had to place those verbs back into the sentences in which they appeared; but then we were asked to let our imaginations run free a bit and contextualize what those sentences were stoking within us — what fire — and…
Christmas drains me. Trying to secure funding for food hampers, and then distributing those hampers fairly is a heavy job. There are so many stories that come with the people walking through my office doors and, after a while, the sheer volume of need takes its toll. Christmas drains many of us if we’re honest. It’s precisely the time we…
Click here — I had to preach this morning. Only this time it was for credit — the first of four between the end of this semester and the end of spring semester. Knowing I had to send this audio file in for actual critical feedback added a new dimension of anxiety, but dem’s da brakes, kid. Dem’s da brakes.…