Today is Pentecost Sunday.  Pentecost falls fifty days after the celebration of Easter, and marks the day when the followers of Jesus had the shared experience of receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit.  As we read in Acts 2, the followers of Jesus were in Jerusalem, unsure of what to do after […]

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    Today is Ascension Sunday — a day when we celebrate the strange yet intriguing account of Christ’s ascension.   The story of the Ascension, therefore, plays a profound and pivotal role in the Gospel story, and in the story of the Church.  Not only is it the story that concludes a few of […]

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  “In him we live and move and have our being…???   Many, if not most of the sermons that are preached from this pulpit seek to focus our attention on the call, the challenge, and the promise of the Christian life.  In light of the life, the teachings, the death and resurrection of Jesus […]

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      They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.  Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.  All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute […]

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    As we all know, the Gospels include a number of stories about people seeing Jesus after his resurrection – conversations in the garden outside the tomb; interactions behind locked doors where the disciples were huddled in fear; long and meaningful interactions over a breakfast on the beach.  Some of those resurrection appearances occupy […]

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  God willing, my mother will turn 98 this year.   She was born in 1919, two years after the Battle of Vimy Ridge and in the year that the Treaty of Versailles was signed, formally ending the conflict that we know as the First World War.  Although only five at the time, she remembers a great deal […]

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    We all know that Easter is about the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.   But there are times when we seem to think of resurrection primarily in otherworldly terms, as an idea connected with what happens to us after death.   That is, a person passes away and — with whatever strands […]

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    We gather together, on this Good Friday morning, to once again ponder the story of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.  For almost two thousand years, the followers of Jesus – and much of our wider culture — have continued to journey back to that terrible hill just outside the city gates of […]

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    Who is this?   Today is Palm Sunday.  It is a day when we are invited to remember, and to reflect upon the celebrations that accompanied Jesus’ entry of Jesus into the city of Jerusalem at the beginning of the week that would end in the brutality of his crucifixion.   As such, […]

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    I find a great degree of wisdom and insight in the opening words of Dante’s “Inferno”.   “At one point midway on our path in life, I came around and found myself now searching, Through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost.”   With these words, Dante began his famous tale […]

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