In your bulletin today you have two pictures that are sometimes called “optical illusions.” When you look at the bigger picture on the back of the insert, do you see a face or do you see a landscape? Most people, it seems, see a face.

In the smaller one that is beneath the order of worship, do you see a goblet or vase, or do you see two profiles? There is a little sign on the communion table that sat for a long time on my father’s desk and for thirty has sat in my own study. Do you see… Continue reading →

Last week we began Ordinary Time by thinking about God and about how Jesus fits into the Christian idea of God. We need to keep all those thoughts at the centre of what we do as a congregation. We have set our own agenda on this second Sunday after Pentecost by participating together in what my father would have called the beautiful ordinance of believer’s baptism. We have been witnesses to, and really participants in Sawyer’s baptism. As I said, baptism is the act of God who calls, the act of the person (in this case Sawyer) who responds, and… Continue reading →

Today the Lectionary is not subtle. It’s Trinity Sunday, and we are assigned two of the most obvious statements of God as triune in all of scripture: the Great Commission and Paul’s benediction from 2 Corinthians 13. Anyone who thinks that the New Testament knows nothing of the Trinity has to climb over these texts.

I remember once being invited to speak to a group of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim university students, along with a rabbi and an imam, to explain the view of God in our respective traditions. It quickly became clear that Christianity was different in that it… Continue reading →

I was taken by Isaiah chapter 40 long ago when I was just learning Hebrew. Through the years it has become my favourite passage in the Bible and has fed my soul over many decades now, as I come back to it again and again. This time I have come to it, asking to be fed yet again, by trying to think through what its words might say interpreted in the light of the feast of Pentecost which we celebrate today.

At Pentecost, the Church celebrates its divine empowerment for the mission of going out into the world in God’s… Continue reading →