Back to the Garden

Sermon preached at St. Margaret's Anglican on August 21, 2022. Appointed readings:  Jer 1:4-10; Ps 71:1-6; Heb 12:18-29 Introduction If you have a Bible with you this evening, it may be helpful to have it handy as this will be one of those sermons that a friend of mine once described as “A Bible in one hand and more Bible in the other.” Now, I am far from a Greek scholar as my seminary transcripts can attest to, and I generally have a rule against appealing to biblical languages in the pulpit. But, just this once, I want to draw your attention to a little bit of text criticism as our way into our epistle reading this evening.   Our lesson from Hebrews begins “You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest… etc.” But what is this “something” that is being referred to? The Book of Hebrews, true to its name, sets out to explicate the gospel of Jesus Christ by way of a close reading of the Hebrew scriptures. With tha...

  Introduction Today is the Octave Sunday of Easter, sometimes referred to as Low Sunday. It’s been a week since we stood witness in this place and heard the good news definitively declared that Christ is Risen and death is defeated. As John Chrysostom’s paschal homily so poignantly proclaims: “Hades was embittered.” The world is heavy with death. The world is at war. Covid rages on into a 6 th wave. It is increasingly clear that runaway climate change is inevitable. Yet even leaving aside the catastrophe that is our present moment in history, death is always quite close to us in our every day lives. People get sick, accidents happen, life expires. Our one certainty in life is death. But last week we did something preposterous. We stood in this place and bore witness to the Risen Christ in our midst. We became, even if just for a moment, contemporaries of the disciples as witnesses to the Resurrected One. So, while we may have come here grieving, and may have left here only ...

  Act 1 - A Spectre is Haunting Canada Rest, rest, perturbèd spirit.—So, gentlemen,  With all my love I do commend me to you,  And what so poor a man as Hamlet is  May do t’ express his love and friending to you,  God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together,  And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.  The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite  That ever I was born to set it right! (Hamlet, 204-211) This week, in an appearance on Radio-Canada, former Prime Minister Jean Chretien commented on his role in overseeing the latter years of Canada’s genocidal residential school system, declaring “The problem was never mentioned when I was minister. Never.” The backlash was immediate and outraged. Academics, activists, and journalists, all pointed out that during Chretien’s tenure as Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, the abuses of the system were well known in the department and well documented. Within a couple days, CBC news had uncovered...

You can listen to the audio here, or read the text below.   CW: Before beginning, I wanted to warn folks that this sermon touches on the genocidal realities of the Indian Residential  School system and the death of children. Introduction On May 28 th Canadians learned that the remains of 215 children had been found on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Social media exploded with orange profile pics and cries of ‘I’m shocked!’ and ‘we had no idea!’ This, despite the fact that in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, released six years ago in 2015, it very clearly said that thousands died at the Residential Schools and many of those remained in undiscovered graves, unable to be found due to the resistance of the church and government and the intentional destruction of records. After the Kamloops 215, it was announced on June 4 th that 104 more graves had been discovered at the Brandon school. On the 25 th , Cowessess First ...

    He went up the mountain…           Our gospel lesson this evening begins on a geographical note. “When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain.” We might be inclined to overlook a detail like this, thinking that the really significant details are WHAT he said, not WHERE he said them. Indeed, this passage which is regularly referred to as “The Sermon on the Mount,” is recorded in Luke’s gospel as “The Sermon on the Plain.” Surely the gospel writers must have been more interested in the sayings of Jesus than the locale of their utterance?             Not so fast, for as far as Matthew’s depiction of these events is concerned, the geography tells us exactly what kind of story this is. Where Jesus delivers that sermon, it turns out, is key to understanding what is going on here. For in Jesus’ ascent up the mountain we hear an echo of another mountain long ago in Israel’s history from which t...