Tag Archives: Third Isaiah

Sermon: Salt and Light

We often worry that as churches get smaller we can no longer answer God’s call to us, that we can no longer serve God as God desires. But Jesus is calling us to be salt, and a small amount of salt can change the flavour of an entire dish; Jesus is calling us to be light, and one lamp on a lampstand can give light to an entire house. Continue reading

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Sermon: The Peaceable Kingdom

How can we look at everything that is happening around us, the homes and livelihoods destroyed by what is usually God’s good gift of water, the thousands of people who have died of covid19 in Australia and the millions who have died around the world, and say that God cares about creation? The author that we know as ‘Third’ Isaiah, from whom today’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures comes, had the same challenge. The description of God’s holy mountain as a place where all creation is renewed seems completely unrealistic. But there was nothing fanciful in what Isaiah was doing. Continue reading

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Sermon for the Epiphany

When I look at the refugee crisis in the world, I wonder whether it happened to remind us that anyone can become a refugee, that God himself became an asylum seeker in Jesus. Continue reading

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Reflection: Rejoice!

One hundred and six years earlier Charles Dickens wrote of the reborn Scrooge, who had become ‘as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew,’ that ‘it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge’. Keeping Christmas well does not just mean rejoicing ourselves, as the prophet Isaiah reminds us. Continue reading

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Sermon: Counter-culturally caring for creation

This is why the Pope, and the Ecumenical Patriarch, and the World Council of Churches have told all Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians that we have a responsibility to respond to the Climate Emergency. As people made in the image of God the Creator we are called to care for God’s creation. Continue reading

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Sermon for Epiphany: Let your light shine

By following Jesus and imitating Christ we can live in such a way that God’s light shines through us to illuminate the world. Continue reading

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Sermon: Joy, delight, and life WILL prevail

Sermon for Williamstown 17th of November, 2013 Isaiah 65:17-25 Over this past week I have been reading and watching the news from the Philippines. Typhoon Haiyan has affected millions of people; hundreds of thousands are displaced and thousands dead. As … Continue reading

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