Waiting is hard. I say this as an only child who always struggled with “delayed gratification”. Looking back, it seems like I always managed to luck out and not have to do the hard work of waiting…

Yesterday we celebrated the Ascension of the Lord and most preaching this Sunday will center around this Feast. The next celebration in the church year will be Pentecost that takes place next Sunday where we will celebrate the power of the Holy Spirit given to the disciples to continue Jesus’ work here on earth. But what about that time in-between; that time when Jesus has left them, but they have not received this power; that time of uncertainty, fear, questioning, and anxiety. That time where they are between and betwixt what has been and what is to come.

The Ascension of the Lord is not about Jesus disappearing into the ether, leaving us stranded ‘holding the bag’, so to speak, weighed down with the impossible task of imitating him ‘til Kingdom Come. Not only is that bleak, but it misses the point…

I was tilling my garden yesterday getting prepared for planting a new crop. As I was working and watching the machine turn the old hard soil into soft, rich looking dirt, my mind wandered to all of the clichés about gardening that are found in the Bible. I was particularly drawn to John 12:24, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” As I pondered this in my own simple way, it made great sense to me biologically and physically. As I contemplated further, it was death and dying that nearly caused me to run the tiller onto the yard.

How can the Christian gospel – the “good news” of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection – become good news for my life? I think this is an important question for us to ask ourselves in Easter Season for this reason: because it is one thing to say “I believe in the gospel” but it is another thing altogether to say “I believe the gospel.”

It’s not often that I preach, or reflect, on the Apostle Paul. To be honest, I usually find Paul to be preachy and misogynistic. Also, he’s kinda disorganized…

“Every year we spend the first few Sundays of Easter telling our stories from scripture about the resurrected Jesus appearing to his friends…And then, as we started to do last week, we begin using the Sunday readings to do something a little different. We begin reading backwards and forwards…”

Today we celebrate and remember Julian of Norwich. She was born about 1342, and when she was thirty years old, she became gravely ill and expected to die. On the seventh day, the medical crisis passed, and she had a series of fifteen visions, or "shewings," in which she was led to contemplate the Passion of Christ. These brought her great peace and joy…

At a recent online summit I attended (virtually) by Wheaton College’s Humanitarian Disaster Institute, retired Anglican Bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright presented a talk titled “What Should a Christian Say About Coronavirus?”…

The book of Psalms is a collection of scriptural prayers that has inspired divine worship for communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims for millennia. Traditionally attributed to King David, the Psalms are read, studied, memorized, translated, sung, and prayed by faithful believers in every generation…

This Sunday we hear part of Jesus’ Good Shepherd reflections with all those well known lines, “I am the Good Shepherd,” and, “I am the gate.” When I first read these lines, I begin to wonder what it means to be “good” and what it means to be a gate…

Paul was an amazing champion for Jesus even though he spent his early life persecuting those who professed faith in the Christ. His conversion is well documented and then his unabashedly faithful witness to Jesus is recorded in no less than fourteen of the books of the New Testament.

Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the work of God in human freedom does not stop with Jesus but continues in us!

The walk to Emmaus is not a story about seeing the Risen Jesus (Jesus is seen from the moment he approaches the disciples to the end of the story). Rather, it is a story about recognizing the Risen Jesus – and, more specifically, about how we – all of us – come to recognize him in our midst.

Today marks the passing of forty days since our churches suspended gathering in public for ministry.

Forty days.

That number, forty, reverberates through the story of the People of God like an active fault line in the crust of the earth. Just saying it aloud cracks open the deepest recesses of our collective memory as pilgrims of the Way – a people confronting God’s will for their lives and listening for God’s word in the wilderness. It touches a nerve.

Black-capped chickadees are a great backyard bird. They can be found pretty much anywhere in Ontario and they are instantly recognizable by their iconic winter song: "chickadee-dee-dee-dee"…

When Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the dead, he comes out of the tomb with “his hands and feet wrapped in a cloth.” Jesus says to the people gathered at the tomb, “Unbind him, and let him go” (Jn 11.44).

When Jesus’ friends discover his tomb empty on Easter Day, they look in and see “the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself” (Jn 20.6-7).

Easter is more than a day. It’s a season.

Easter Sunday. Empowered by God’s word addressed to us, may we proclaim with Mary, “I have seen the Lord.”.

The Book of Psalms is a collection of ancient poetic prayers. On Good Friday, it is traditional to pray Psalm 22 in remembrance of Christ's suffering on the cross. On this solemn day, this text is offered as an invitation for study and prayer.