Sermons

Have you ever reached the place where Life become more a struggle, where even your religion seems to be dead weight on your shoulders and you wonder whether it is worth the struggle? I think we all do in varying degrees and when that happens so let's take our busyness down, and look at it because something has gone radically wrong.

Sometime when religious life or family life or just life is supposed to be uplifting and sustaining it becomes just another piece of heavy luggage to carry.

This reading from Acts begins by taking us into the strange world of exorcisms.  No it's not Linda Bair but a young girl who was controlled by a pimp to perform acts of foretelling the future.

We don't know what her practices celebrate, whether she was a Gnostic or some other new Age variety, we do know that she was mad at the Christians because she thought they were enslaved to a single God.

I know for most of you you're glad that finals are finally over. I don't know why we call them finals because in terms of your life there is nothing final about them. The exams later in life get shorter but come in bundles.

This week beside wearing a gown and tassel you're all just itching to meet your room mate for collage next year.

I remember a few summers ago the news was filled with predictions that all greenery in the Chicago area would disappear because the cascades were coming. Well as of yesterday things still look green so I guess the birds downloaded the Open Table app and went to town.

My first experience in ministry marked a turning point in my understanding of the environmental relationships. The United Church provided a program where you could go and try out ministry and if you made a flub of it, no one would here about it till years later, so remote were these locations.

I was in Ear Falls, a little hydro dam up 100 miles or so from Vermillion Bay, on the way to where the highway ends in Red Lake. I was running a summer camp for kids who were from a Indian village 700 miles further north of Red lake.

In the 19th century, it was established that life had begun in the oceans, some scientists reasoned that the earliest forms of life might still be there, hidden in the deep, dark recesses of the open sea, where human beings cannot descend. They were certain that in that world of darkness lay the first forms of life. In 1872, Sir Charles Thomson left England aboard a ship called the Challenger to sail through all the oceans of the world to test this theory. For four years they sailed the oceans, sixty-nine thousand miles, dragging the ocean bottom.