The hymn we just sang is a favourite of mine, often used on Trinity Sunday. It is based upon the ancient Te Deum. Though I love it, I almost rejected it for use today - it has ha ... read more

I had to smile when I saw this logo in an advert for the Invictus Games coming to Sydney in October. You see I had wanted to pick up on the `I am` statement in our gospel r ... read more

In 2013 I went to Israel with Nev and Marg, and Cathie Lambert, for a two-week tour of some of the main places that feature in Jesus` life. While so many things have sadly changed over the past few years, what hasn`t ch ... read more

The Books of Samuel relate the story of the rise and development of Kingship in Israel. If we go back a little, we read in the Book of Joshua, the way Israel took possessi ... read more

In recognition of Naidoc Week and acknowledgement of the prior inhabitants of this land, this poem The Song of Hope by Oodgeroo (Kath Walker) written in the 1960s has bee ... read more

The lectionary for this week is a colourful tapestry of drama, factional disputation, allegory, all woven together into a rich mixture, like good fruitcake. It beg ... read more

I was catching up with Leanne Watson some months ago, and we were discussing our home offices and our propensity for having messy ones. I won the award for the messiest one when we compared photos of th ... read more

Carl Sagan: By far the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night. I believe that it is very diff ... read more

As you know, last week we did not join the other churches at the Anglican Church for the Pentecost service. There was a very good reason for just being together as a church, and our servic ... read more

In a world with such inequalities, of opportunities, of wealth, of power, of safety, today I want to talk about unity. Not a unity where everyone believes the same thing, but a unity that combines who we are biological ... read more

In both the Lectionary and in the media there have been a lot of references to good and bad fruit with a Royal Commission revealing so many organisations and people profiting from handing out bad fru ... read more

The Psalm, and the reading from John`s gospel are very familiar. They conjure up warm and fuzzy pictures of a long-haired bloke in a dressing gown cuddling a cute little white ... read more

I always have a bit of a problem with the time after Easter. It is a time in the scriptural readings when we hear about the post resurrection appearances of Jesus. While they appear in Luke, Matthew and John, Mark ha ... read more

Resurrecting Easter: How the West lost and the East kept the original Easter Vision by John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crossan, 2018.

Readings: Genesis 4:1-10; Micah 4:2-4; Matthew 27: 50-53

Genesis 4: 1-10 - biblic ... read more

When Karen played that song (called `Sun` by the group `Sleeping at Last`) a month or so ago, one particular phrase intrigued me. I guess space, and time Takes violent things, angry things And makes ... read more

Weep not for me. Weep for yourselves and your children.

On Good Friday 2018, Neville Watson conducted worship in the Wembley Downs Uniting Church and preached his last sermon. In his ... read more

Not long ago I went to a show called `White Spirit` as part of the Festival of Perth. Led by the haunting voice of Noureddine Khourchid, the son of a Syrian Sufi sh ... read more

Lent. We started this journey a few weeks ago when we shared in an Ash Wednesday service at the Church of Christ. It was a beautiful service led by Dennis Ryle, and perhaps not as dire as many of you might think. ... read more

You have to have some sympathy for Moses. He was in charge of a vast horde of refugees. They were escaping from Egypt - let`s face it they were kicked out! T ... read more

We live in a violent world, that much we already know. We see it on our screens, in our books and in the papers we read. People resort to violence, physical or verbal to get what they want, to seek revenge, to assert p ... read more

As the human race migrated to the four corners of the earth, they diverged into many different religious and ethnic groups. The human race, now 8 billion in number, is rapidly converging into a globalized society faced ... read more

Miracles. While I don`t want this sermon to be about miracles, or the lack of them, because I think the reading from Mark today says so much more to us about Jesus than a mere miracle worker, I feel that I might start ... read more

It is fairly clear that our understanding of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus are usually formed by our continued exposure to the traditional Christmas Story embellished as it is with beliefs that simply do no ... read more

The story of `Jonah and the Whale` ranks alongside `Noah`s Ark` as one of the classic bible stories, and amongst the few that children continue to know today. It was indeed comp ... read more

I feel privileged to be giving the sermon on New Year`s Eve. Christmas is over, both the secular festival, with its pretty lights and presents and the celebration of Jesus` birth, for us the dawning of a new day, a new ... read more

That excerpt from Miriam Therese Winter`s song takes us back to the 1960`s when we too were young and full of energy and naivety. For many of us the music which this particular song typified was revolutionary. Here w ... read more

Well I wonder what you made of those readings?! In terms of my own theological framework they are way past their use-by date. The one from Isaiah would seem to bear echoes of a vol ... read more

A couple of weeks after hearing a sermon on Psalms 51:2-4 (knowing my own hidden secrets) and Psalm 52:3-4 (lies and deceit), a man wrote the following letter to the Taxation Department ... read more

We live in a world that expects perfection. We are to have the perfect life, the perfect job, the perfect children, and we are to be the perfect parents. Ouch, I think I might have failed there. I wanted the boys ... read more

First let`s hear about the Old Testament context for our Exodus reading for today. Some of you may have seen an SBS documentary not long ago linking the biblical plagues recorded i ... read more