Tag Archives: Year of Mark
Sermon: The Return of the King
Whenever we celebrate the Feast of the Reign of Christ, the last Sunday in the church year, I remind us of what a new festival this is. When people united their loyalty to ‘God, King, and country,’ as they did right up to the First World War, there was little suggestion that their loyalty to God might contradict their loyalty to an earthly ruler. But after that war fascism and communism began to dominate Europe, and so the Roman Catholic Church introduced the Reign of Christ as a feast to be celebrated in 1925. Continue reading
Sermon: Is the poor widow a good example or an awful warning?
If we read the story this way, then Jesus’ attitude to the widow’s gift is disapproval rather than admiration. The story is not about the difference between arrogant scribes and poor widows, or about the relative value of the gifts of the rich and the poor. Instead, it is an example of the ways that the official religion of the time was oppressing the poorest members of society. Continue reading
Sermon: God comes to us in bread
We do not have a disembodied faith in which only the spiritual is important. We have an embodied, physical, material faith in which food is vitally important. Christianity is most definitely not about ‘pie in the sky when you die’. It is about bread here and now, because our God comes to us in bread. Continue reading
Sermon: Success and Failure
We may think that we can only be sure that God is with us if we are growing greater and greater, like David. But the gospel according to Mark tells us that God is with us even if people take offence at us and we can do no deeds of power. Continue reading
Reflection: Gender Equality in Jesus’ healings
You may have noticed my tendency to talk about the way that Jesus treated women, the way he welcomed them as equals in a patriarchal society. That is not just because gender equality is a personal obsession of mine; it is because this equality is a characteristic of the new community that Jesus created, the body of Christ. Continue reading
Reflection: Chaos and Creation
As Australians watching, we need to celebrate those striving for justice and condemn those fighting to overturn a democratic election. And we need to ensure that in our own country, we do the same; that as part of the Australian community we are on the side of love and justice. Because that is the side of God. Continue reading
Sermon: Aren’t there times when you just want to punch Hitler?
I can remember the shock and fear I felt watching an ABC documentary that screened in 2000, so well within my adult life, about the bashing of gay men in Townsville. One young man said, ‘I’m a Catholic. It’s meant to be a woman with a man, not a man with a man. That’s sick. That’s hitting material’. Continue reading
Sermon: Scarcity, Abundance, and ‘Enoughness’
We are not God, we are not called to be God, and so just as we are, we are good enough, perfect enough, powerful enough, strong enough, extraordinary enough. Continue reading
Communion, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, has many symbolic and spiritual meanings, but it is also always about feeding the world’s hungry. Continue reading
Sermon: So, you want to have a king …
In the same way that we can be certain that the author of Samuel was wrong to attribute a desire for genocide to God, we can be certain that there are things that we believe about God today that will later be revealed to be wrong – because we are human and, as the Apostle Paul wrote, we currently only ‘see in a mirror, dimly’. Continue reading
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