Good shepherding (John 10: 11-18)

This is probably the wrong cultural allusion with which to begin today’s sermon, but who here has ever watched and enjoyed those old Bugs Bunny & the Roadrunner cartoons? Growing up as kids, my brother and I used to watch them all the time on TV and we loved ‘em! While we far more enjoyed the antics of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam and Marvin the Martian than many of the others, even those lesser-known characters were still important to our enjoying cartoon fun.

A piece of fish for the Master (Luke 24: 36b – 48)

Today’s Gospel lesson is a lovely, heart-warming story. There are just so many elements of it on which a clergyperson can speak, that it becomes difficult to choose. Should we speak on Jesus’ sudden arrival into the disciples’ midst while the doors and windows were locked? Should we talk about Jesus’ first words, “Peace be with you”, or would His last words about being witnesses be more appropriate? Or would it be even better to discuss how Jesus’ charge to the disciples – their witnessing – is both the forerunner to and mirror of our own lives as followers of Christ? Any and all of these have proved to be fertile grounds for ministers’ sermons over the millennia, but today, I’d like to focus on the piece of fish that Jesus ate.

Believing our own eyes (John 20: 19-31)

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the HMS Titanic, and we look back on it still with senses of wonder and of awe. That ship was a marvel; touted as “unsinkable”, its initial distress signals after striking the iceberg were ignored. Nobody believed such a thing was possible. Even many of those on the Titanic didn’t believe it at first, until the watery evidence quickly proved otherwise. Sadly, people had to see it with their own eyes before they awakened to the reality of the situation and believed.

The stone that is doubt (Mark 16: 1-8)

As the parents of a small child, one of the things with which my wife and I are having a great degree of difficulty is when we try and show our son how to do something, only to be met with the exasperating whine of a 3-year-old, “Nooooo. I can’t do that!” So we sigh and try yet again, and again, and sometimes again, until we somehow manage to get him to understand that yes, he is able to do the task we’ve been showing him. It’s important that we do that, for we don’t want him to wallow in some ill-perceived depths of doubting his own abilities.