The social distancing measures that have been prescribed in the attempt to “flatten the curve” of the Coronavirus pandemic, have resulted in the unprecedented (in our lifetime) necessity of celebrating the events of Holy Week and the season of Easter in relative isolation in our homes.
In the attempt to encourage the faithful, and also recognizing that many people now have additional time on their hands, I will be aiming to make available some audio and video of previously recorded sermons and lectures.
Last summer, one of my Good Friday sermons, “The Death of an Extremist” appeared in the journal Theodidaktos published by the Evangelical Mennonite Conference. I was able to track down an audio recording of the service in which the sermon was preached at Good Shepherd Community Church in Scarborough, ON in 2009.
Over the summer, my Good Friday sermon “The Death of an Extremist” appeared as the Feature Sermon in an issue of Theodidaktos on the theme of “Atonement: What is the Message of the Cross?” Theodidaktos is published by the Evangelical Mennonite Conference. The sermon goes back to my time serving as a congregational pastor in Toronto, but it is one of my favourites, narrowly missing the cut for inclusion in Leaps of Faith.Continue reading “The Death of an Extremist”: A Good Friday Sermon→
The following is the conclusion to a lecture I recently gave, entitled “Parsing the Grammar of Atonement.”
All of the biblical metaphors for atonement are needed. They serve as necessary imaginative windows into the utterly irreducible reality of the reconciliation accomplished in the person of Christ. “The metaphors,” Colin Gunton observes, “are the means by which it is possible to speak of the meaning of the gospel narratives taken as a whole.”1 This quotation from Gunton is helpful as it gestures towards two significant aspects of how metaphors function, both of which are sometimes forgotten when the metaphors are pressed in an overly theorized direction. Continue reading Proclaiming the Crucifixion→
Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 42. ↩
This is the twelfth in a series of posts engaging with the sermons in Leaps of Faith: Sermons from the Edge. This post is a reflection upon a Good Friday sermon entitled “A Tale of Two Jesuses” (pp. 116-124). The Scriptural texts for the sermon were Matthew 27:11-26 and Isaiah 52:13-53:12. Continue reading A Tale of Two Jesuses→