Colourful Dreamer

This can be listened to here Gate Pa – Year A 30 th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Reformation Sunday, 30th Anniversary of my Ordination as a Priest Readings: Psalm                          Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17 First Reading :               Deuteronomy 34:1-12                     Second Reading :        1 Thess 2:1-8                                  Gospel :                        Matthew 22: 34-46                              What I want to say: On this Reformation Sunday I want to explore some of the elements that have helped re-form me over the last 30 years. I also want to suggest that our gospel today gives us hints as to how we might as a church be re-formed as we move into our own time of Reformation What I want to happen: Invite people to prayerfully consider what has helped re-form them? The Sermon        1.      Introduction: Tuesday marked the 30 th anniversary of my ordination as a priest by Archbishop Brian Davies in St. John’s Anglican C

This Sunday we commemorate that 500 years ago Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and began the Reformation. There is much to celebrate about the legacy of that movement, and much to mourn. We live in a time of similar if less violent reformation. It is not a comfortable place to be. 30 years ago I was ordained a priest in a church that has struggled with our own reformation experience. What does leadership look like in this new time? What does it mean to be Anglican? What might re-formation look like for us? Jesus tells us clearly in today’s reading – Love God by loving your neighbour. It is as simple and as hard as that. 

The gospel reading this week is again well known and it seems pretty straight forward. Some of the Jerusalem leadership – Pharisees and Herodian’s, are trying to trick Jesus with a question about Roman taxes in the hope that he will say something that will either lose him the support of the masses, or be treasonous. Instead Jesus seems to play the Anglican card and takes the middle way – pay to Caesar what is Caesars, and to God what is God’s. Except for Romans’ Caesar was god (the coins carried an image of Caesar’s head with the title “son of god” making them idolatrous to Jews) and all things belonged to that god Caesar. For Jews the opposite was true – all things belong to God, nothing to Caesar. What was Jesus saying – well not the separation of church and state that we keep hearing. But what he was saying depended on where you stood. So what is he saying to us? Everything belongs to God.   All people and all things. And we are to treat them as such. The rule of the Francisc

This can be listened to here Gate Pa – Year A  28 th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Readings: Psalm              Psalm 106:1-6,19-23                                                               First Reading:                  Exodus 32:1-14                                            Second Reading: Phil 4:1-9                                                    Gospel:                Matthew 22:1-14                                        What I want to say: I want to explore how the three stories Jesus tells in answer to the question “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” are not separate unrelated stories, but build on each other. When we read them in this way they offer us another way of hearing todays story as a critique of a common way of understanding the kingdom of heaven. It all goes back to how we end the story about the vineyard What I want to happen: People to reflect on the ending where the landowner f