Sermon Notes: June 23 2019, Aboriginal Sunday Remote First Nations communities face conditions that we would not tolerate in southern Canada. That prompts the question, ‘What does it mean to love your neighbour as Jesus commands?’ Maybe you wish you didn’t have to pay income tax. But second thoughts might make you change your mind. […]
A progressive theology St. George’s Anglican Church Lowville espouses a “progressive theology” (also called a liberal theology) within the Anglican tradition. By this, we mean that we see ourselves as God’s people, created in the divine likeness by a loving Creator. Our progressive theology inspires the goal of developing our parish as a loving community […]
Scripture: Luke 22: 14-20 Today we begin Holy Week. Instead of talking about Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem in triumph, I want to look ahead to Thursday and Jesus’ Last Supper. We are so familiar with taking Communion together that it is easy to miss just what was going on. Jesus and the disciples were all […]
Scripture: Luke 15: 1-32 God’s Lost and Found area must be very different from the one at the school where Michelle and I go square dancing. The school’s Lost and Found is a long row of hooks in the main corridor. They start off empty each Fall. By now, every hook is overflowing with unclaimed […]
Scripture: Luke 5: 1-11; Jeremiah 1: 4-10 Today’s Gospel raised the question for me: “What must we do to follow Jesus?” Luke describes the call of the first disciples differently from Matthew and Mark. As Matthew and Mark describe the event, Jesus was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, when he saw […]
Scripture: Luke 1: 26-38 Luke presents us with a wonderful account of the origins of Jesus, the Messiah (Jesus, the Christ, to use the Greek term). Last week, the story seemed to begin at a tangent; the priest Zechariah had a vision while he worked in the Temple. The angel Gabriel told Zechariah that his […]
Sources: Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament, Oxford University Press, 2000, Chapter 8; Fred B. Craddock, Luke (Interpretation Series), John Knox Press, 1990, Introduction. Who wrote Luke’s Gospel? We do not know the identity of ‘Luke’. There is no evidence that Luke was a physician. Most scholars think that the same person wrote Luke’s Gospel and […]
Mark certainly managed to highlight the disciples’ human foibles. A few weeks ago, we found them arguing about which of them was the greatest. Today, we read that James and John wanted to get the best seats at the heavenly table. Not surprisingly, the other disciples were more than a little ticked off at James’ […]
The Book of Job addresses the question, “Why do the righteous suffer?” in the form of a story. Job is clearly not a real person. Much of what I will say comes from an excellent summary by Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book When bad things happen to good people. Kushner believes that the book’s […]
St. Mary in the Bible Most Anglicans don’t often think about Mary, the mother of Jesus. We meet her in the Advent story of the Annunciation, but at Christmas-time our focus is on the birth of Jesus. Mary tends to be rather a bit-player in typical Christmas pageants – the shepherds and the Magi usually […]