They interpret scripture, but they ask something of those who hear them. A sermon is spoken within a community gathered to remember, confess, listen, give thanks, and become more available to God and one another.
Although sermons are delivered to Christians, the questions they address belong to a wider world. How do we live truthfully? What do we do with guilt, suffering, failure, desire, and hope? How might forgiveness become real? What does love require of us?
Christian communities are called to make the life of God visible through compassion, justice, hospitality, and joy. Yet churches often struggle to fulfil this vocation. They can become social systems shaped by conformity, status, fear, and exclusion. Their histories include colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and abuse. These failures wound those who are marginalized, while also diminishing those who benefit from the structures themselves.
The sermons and reflections gathered here arise within this tension. They remain rooted in Christian scripture and the life of Jesus, while also being shaped by Buddhist practices of attention, silence, compassion, and non-attachment. These practices return us to lived experience: to the body, to suffering, to desire, to the present moment, and to the person before us.
The aim is not to dissolve Christianity into a general spirituality. It is to ask whether religious language produces awakened lives. Does it make us more attentive, truthful, compassionate, joyful, and free? These reflections seek a faith that can be experienced, embodied, and shared.
The Gift of Knowledge: Absorbed by Truth
What if knowledge is not something we possess, but something that transforms us? Drawing on Thomas Merton, Scripture, contemplative tradition, and a deeply personal journey, this essay challenges the modern desire to master truth through intellect, certainty, and control. Knowledge appears instead as gift: received with humility, joined to love, and capable of awakening us to grace in ourselves, others, and the world. From abandoned academic ambitions to an unexpected life in Asia, the author traces how being known can matter more than knowing everything. This sermon invites readers to stop grasping and become more fully absorbed by truth itself.
Last Words; Lasting Inheritances
Which words remain with us long after the people who spoke them are gone? In this deeply personal reflection, Considering the inheritances left by my father, my father-in-law, and the words of 1 John. Blessing and responsibility, grief and gratitude, memory and action come together in an account of love that must be received, carried, and eventually released with open hands. As his own children prepare to leave home, I ask what it means to live truthfully within what we have inherited, and what kind of inheritance our lives are quietly becoming for those who follow after us.
Doubt Beyond Certainty
Doubt is not the enemy of faith; it is one of the ways faith grows. Drawing on Charles Taylor and cross-cultural experience, this reflection explores the movement from inherited certainty toward a more relational, searching, and lived spirituality. It contrasts doctrinal defensiveness with pilgrimage, humility, friendship, and openness to transformation. In a pluralistic world, faith may no longer begin with having all the answers. It may begin with the courage to keep seeking, listening, and changing. This article invites readers to consider whether uncertainty can deepen belief and whether authentic faith is too alive to be reduced to certainty.
Where Do You Come From? (Ephesians 2:11-22)
Where do we truly belong in a world where people increasingly live between nations, cultures, families, and faiths? Beginning with the simple question, “Where do you come from?” this reflection explores home as more than geography. Drawing on Ephesians 2, it considers belonging, movement, migration, memory, stillness, and the peace offered through Christ. Home may be found in the people we carry within us, the communities that receive us, and the presence of God that crosses every boundary. This Sermon invites readers to reconsider home as the place where identity, belonging, and spiritual rootedness come together within our shared lives.
Prayer and Meditation
What if prayer and meditation are not rival spiritual practices, but two movements of the same awakened life? This essay explores how prayer can become aggressive when detached from attention, while meditation can become empty when separated from response. Drawing on Thomas Merton, the ordinary life of Jesus, and the disciplines of silence, wonder, and perseverance, it argues that spiritual life requires the conversion of the whole self. Prayer without meditation loses contact with reality; meditation without prayer risks becoming self-absorption. This reflection invites readers to recover both practices as inseparable forms of attentiveness to God, life, and shared responsibility.
The Only Guilty Man in Shawshank
Admitting guilt in a culture of self-justification is profound. Beginning with Red’s unforgettable confession in The Shawshank Redemption, this reflection turns toward Christian institutions, personal failure, and the difficult path to freedom. Innocence is easy to claim, especially when communities protect themselves from accountability. Far rarer is the courage to face what we have done and still believe redemption is possible. This brief, searching essay asks whether confession can become the beginning of liberation, and whether grace is most powerful when it reaches those who no longer pretend they have nothing to be forgiven for today.
Making Our Way Through Mixed Messages: The Incarnation of God and Human Flourishing
How do we recognize the good life amid the mixed messages of wealth, success, consumption, and achievement? Rooted in 1 John 4 and shaped by family memory, this reflection explores the incarnation of God as a present reality revealed through love. Grace frees us from the exhausting need to earn worth, while the Spirit draws us back to relationships, attention, and shared life. Human flourishing is neither distant nor mysterious. It grows through the people beside us, the bonds we tend, and the love we practice. This sermon invites readers to discover God’s presence here and now with one another.
To Share A Joy
“Of living in authentic clearing,
not as an “I” who’s always fearing,
Of tossing up a steely-ball self,
and setting it on my history shelf.”
Fulfilled Needs and Desires: by Gift or by Effort?
What if the things we need cannot be achieved by effort alone? Drawing on Thomas Merton, scripture, and personal experience, this reflection examines the modern ideal of the self-made individual and the despair it can produce. Love, identity, meaning, vocation, and belonging often arrive as gifts rather than rewards for control or ambition. The essay asks what becomes possible when we loosen our grip on autonomy, become open to grace, and choose life as something received rather than manufactured. It is an honest meditation on surrender, humility, freedom, and the courage to welcome what we could never secure for ourselves.
Love Your Neighbor – A Meditation
What does it mean to love a neighbour in ordinary life? Written in memory of Wayne, this meditation reflects on hospitality, shared work, practical kindness, and the small gestures that make strangers feel at home. Through the story of the Good Samaritan, it asks whether eternal life is found less in self-justification than in learning to recognize the person beside us as neighbour. A warm hat, a borrowed tool, a meal, a conversation across the fence: such acts can embody a life of care. This reflection invites readers to notice the people whose generosity teaches communities how to belong together.
From Doing to Being: What Stories do we tell Ourselves?
What stories do we tell ourselves about who we are and what makes us worthy? Drawing on the rich man in Mark 10, a newcomer’s poem, and personal experience across cultures and family life, this sermon explores how identities built around achievement, fear, respectability, or failure can become barriers to joy and communion with God. Hebrews 4 offers another possibility: rest, honesty, mercy, and grace. Rather than proving ourselves through endless striving, we are invited to loosen our grip on the stories that conceal us and enter the presence of a God who already knows us and calls us closer.
Forgiveness is the Remedy of Freedom
on Hannah Arendt and the words of Jesus from the cross, this reflection explores forgiveness as the remedy that keeps action from becoming a prison. Because every deed enters a web of relationships, its effects are unpredictable and cannot simply be undone. Without forgiveness, people remain trapped by what they have done and by what has been done to them. Forgiveness does not erase suffering. It releases the past’s absolute claim upon the future, making room for responsibility, renewed relationship, and the human capacity to begin again together.
The Beginning of Cosmic Restoration (Part 1)
What begins with clearing snow from a neighbour’s driveway becomes a searching reflection on forgiveness, reciprocity, and grace. Human relationships often function like transactions: favour for favour, injury for injury, debt for repayment. Drawing on Jesus’ teaching and the story of Joseph and his brothers, this sermon asks whether forgiveness can carry us beyond spiritual bookkeeping. Joseph’s embrace reveals grace as personal, abundant, and restorative, capable of reopening relationships damaged by betrayal. This essay invites readers to imagine cosmic restoration beginning in ordinary acts that release resentment, interrupt cycles of judgment, and make room for neighbours to meet again together.
The Cosmic Restoration (Part 2)
What hides behind the public faces we present to the world? Drawing on Moses, Paul, and the transfiguration of Jesus, this sermon explores the veils of respectability, moral superiority, and religious certainty that conceal our need for grace. Cosmic restoration begins when those veils are removed and the darkness within us is brought honestly into God’s presence. Jesus appears here as more than teacher or healer: he is the source of glory, mercy, transformation, and freedom. This reflection invites readers to relinquish pretense, encounter the living Christ, and discover how vulnerability can become the beginning of restoration in shared life.
Ordered to be Free: a Meditation Learning
We are commanded to become free? This meditation explores the paradox of responsibility: we are expected to act voluntarily, yet also to do what is required. That tension can intensify the sense of being a separate self, cut off from the world around us. Drawing on Zen insight and ecological awareness, the essay invites readers to experience the self differently, as part of a living field of relationship. Meditation appears here neither as self-improvement nor escape, but as an awakening of generalized awareness, richer perception, and enjoyment. Freedom may begin when we stop grasping and simply attend fully.
Jephthah and his Daughter
Jephthah’s Daughter: a Heroine of Sacrifice and Faith
What can a difficult biblical story reveal about sacrifice, faith, and the hidden labour that sustains our lives? This sermon revisits Jephthah’s daughter, a nameless woman whose costly faithfulness exposes both the violence of her circumstances and the depth of her courage. Placed alongside Jesus, Paul, and the sacrifices made by women in families and communities, her story challenges modern confidence in moral progress and easy self-justification. The reflection asks what we may need to relinquish: judgment, pride, isolation, and despair, so that grace can become embodied through hospitality, reconciliation, service, and a more faithful love of neighbour together today.
Heroes of Faith: The Story of Jephthah
What can one of the Bible’s most disturbing stories teach us about sacrifice, faithfulness, and grace? Jephthah’s daughter is often remembered only as the victim of her father’s terrible vow. This reflection asks us to see her also as a courageous woman whose costly faith exposes the hidden sacrifices that sustain families, communities, and religious life. Set beside Jesus, Paul, and the lives of women whose gifts often go unrecognized, her story challenges modern confidence in moral progress. The essay invites readers to relinquish judgment, pride, isolation, and despair, and to rediscover salvation through hospitality, reconciliation, service, and hope together.