You’re probably all aware that we are reaching the end of our liturgical year, in two weeks we will be in Advent, and with the end of the liturgical year we are hearing the last lessons from Matthew’s Gospel. They are not the easiest ones. They are what we call the “Parables of judgment”: The…

All Saints’ Day in one of those very rare occasions where we get to read from the Book of Revelation, at least in mainline protestant churches. There is a good reason for that, and it probably has to do with the fact that the Book of Revelation is a bit suspicious to us. By that,…

We’ve have just heard the fourth and last chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, and we will conclude today on this series. In these past weeks, we have come to explore a bit of Paul’s theology, his fundamental beliefs about Christ and about Christian life. Mainly, we talked about how Paul considers that humility,…

We continue today with the reading of the Letter to the Philippians, we’re now in Chapter 3. Last week, we turned our attention to Paul’s “mini-creed”, this hymn he wrote to summarize his beliefs about Christ and Christ’s mission, and we may have been quite surprised that for Paul, basically, the story of Christ can…

We continue this week to read Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and we will read the whole letter over the course of the month. This week we’re in chapter 2. The idea is for us to explore both Paul’s theology, his way of understanding who is Christ and what is Christ’s mission, and also to…

For four weeks in a row, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians shows up in our lectionary, starting this Sunday. We have four weeks because there are four chapters in the letter, and the lectionary assigns an extract of each chapter to each week. Now the lectionary also gives liturgical teams the option to lengthen a…

This section of the Gospel from which we have read this morning (Chap.18) is known as Jesus’s instructions on “Church discipline”. So it does not sound like a lot of fun, and on top of that, it does not seem to make much sense with what have been talking about in those two past weeks:…

Barbara Brown Taylor is a famous preacher and one of the things she says is that she hates to have to preach on suffering because she always worries that “God is going to put [her] to the test on what she has just said”. This is meant as a joke of course but, as it…

I couldn’t be happier with the Gospel we have just heard this morning because I think this is the perfect place for us to start our class on “how to share our faith with others” with Mark Mittleberg’s book. The passage of the Gospel we have just heard is known as “Peter’s confession”(as in “Confession…

The Gospel we have heard this morning may sound a little bit confusing (at least it sounded a bit confusing to me when I first read it!) and I think there are two reasons for it that we will need to unpack: One reason of contents, one reason of form. – As for the contents,…