(Another from my liberal episcopal friend…) Rehearsal John 11: 18-44 By Harry T. Cook In June 1963, the late Martin Luther King Jr. came to Detroit to lead a civil rights march along the city’s premiere street known as Woodward Avenue. Nothing like it had ever occurred in the Motor City. Some 125,000 people, including […]
March 5, 2008 ‘Thou shalt not steal sermons from the Internet,’ Polish priests told Poland ‘s Roman Catholic priests have been warned to stop using the Internet to plagiarise sermons for their Sunday Masses. “A sermon is a composition — as such, it comes under the law on authors’ rights,” said Professor Tomasz Naganowski, an […]
A few weeks ago on Shrove Tuesday I spent the evening with friends entering into the age-old tradition of eating pancakes. Being somewhat ignorant of this annual ritual, I asked one of my friends what Shrove Tuesday is all about and why we eat pancakes to commemorate it. When he told me that it is […]
John 9: 1-38 By Harry T. Cook John Newton did not write those words in his hymn “Amazing Grace†because he could not physically see. He wrote them because, over time, he began to see things differently – things having to do with the treatment of African people sold in slavery. What he had once […]
(Another thoughtful sermon from my liberal provocative friend, Harry Cook). Beyond All That By Harry T. Cook John 4: 5-42 When one reads or hears John’s story of the Samaritan woman who encountered Jesus at the well, it is necessary to remember that there was a centuries-long, malevolent animus between Samaritans and Jews. The Samaritans […]
(Another interesting/challenging sermon from a liberal friend) Feb. 17, 2008 Depth and Breadth, Not Length By Harry T. Cook John 3: 1-17 For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. There in one memorable verse you have the […]
Feb. 10, 2008 By Harry T. Cook Matthew 4: 1-11 In the backwash of Super Tuesday – the big casino of several state presidential primaries – it is not at all inappropriate to ask what is driving anybody aspiring to the highest office of what is at least for now the most powerful nation in […]
Jan. 27, 2008 “Dropping Everything and Leaving†By Harry T. Cook Matthew 4: 12-13 An issue is raised for aspiring Christians in today’s reading from Matthew, which depicts the calling of four of what would become a total of 12 disciples. All four of them – two pairs of what the text calls “brothers,†but […]
Dr. Keith Dyer (Professor of New Testament, Whitley College, University of Melbourne) Placing Bible and homosexuality together in the one sentence always provokes questions. Some questioners are genuinely puzzled, some are angry: Why do we continue to ask what the Bible says about homosexuality when the few verses that do seem to refer to it […]
The Feast of the Epiphany, January 6th, 2008 Some Christians are grateful for the feast of the Epiphany (‘the manifestation/epiphaneia of Christ to the gentiles’) on 6 January each year because it offers a second-bite at the greeting card cherry: any number of Christmas cards carry the familiar Three Kings as the artwork, and if […]