Tag Archives: forgiveness

Sermons and Preaching

David and the Gibeonites

Read 2 Samuel 21:1-14 to start.

Before I begin this morning, I’m going to start with a warning. This is not a pleasant or happy passage of scripture, and this is not a pleasant or happy sermon. It details with a lot of disturbing and violent things, so if you are squeamish, I apologize in advance. It also raises some real and important questions that I think we all need to address, now perhaps more than ever.

I will start with the questions, there are three of them.

  1. How do we behave when the balance of power tips in our favour?
  2. How do we react when things go wrong?
  3. How do we respond when we are treated unfairly?

We’ll get to those in a few minutes, but first, here’s something that you probably don’t know about me. You might know that I was born in a country that no longer exists, namely, the former Yugoslavia. But you probably don’t know that technically speaking, I’m Serbian Orthodox. They baptized me into that particular church when I was a baby, because my mom had been raised Catholic, and really, really wanted to make sure I got baptized right away. Serbian Orthodox was the most readily available option in Belgrade in 1975.

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Sermons and Preaching

Apology and forgiveness

Read Luke 17: 1-5 to start.

A few weeks my wife had her hair dyed. She has a good friend who has done this for her in the past, and the same friend came over again and helped her with it. That friend’s husband also came along, he’s a friend of mine, and so we had some time to chat while all the hair colouring stuff was going on, neither of us had anything to contribute to that, and it was far better to stay out of the way. We talked about all that’s going on in the world today, in particular with our neighbour to the south, we talked about politics, we talked about school, we talked about literature. As it happens, we both went to the same high school, although a few years apart, and we had some of the same teachers, and so we reminisced about that. This is what happens when you get older, kids, you sit around and talk about the past way more than is really needed.

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