Jesus Scholar N.T. (Tom) Wright says our time, “the modern Western world is built on anxiety. You see it on the faces of people hurrying to work. You see it even more as they travel home, tired but without having solved life’s problems. The faces are weary, puzzled, living with the unanswerable question as to what it all means.

The buzzword of our time is diversity. You hear it all the time. As Halifax has sought to reinvent itself and plan for a new day the word consultants, politicians and citizen forums like to use is diversity, as in we need to become more diverse. 

According my dictionary an apparition is a supernatural appearance of a person or thing. I had never heard of the term apparition until I served the church in Cape Breton. Do you remember the sightings of the Virgin Mary at the local Tim Horton’s and Lick-a-Chick in Bras d'Or?

Do you remember the story about the Road to Emmaus? Hear these words: While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him…When the stranger was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. 

In our text this morning we hear Peter deny “his Lord” Jesus three times. It is a powerful indictment of Peter. But is it? That depends on why you think Jesus died on a cross two thousand years ago.

As many of you know I love to walk. And I walk fast. But I can only walk when I have a destination in mind for my travel. I simply cannot go to a track and walk in circles. I cannot go out and walk here and there and then return, with nothing to show for the experience.

Kim and I appear to like paintings that feature windows looking out on the horizon. A few months ago Lucy and I were at a Street Yard Sale in Halifax and I spotted a large print of the Christopher Pratt work Cottage Interior.

If you ever join the congregation of Brunswick Street United Church for worship on a Sunday night for 6 pm Bible Study and/or 7 pm worship Sandy will pass you No Other Foundations: The History of Brunswick Street United Church with its Methodist Inheritance written by Margaret Campbell. 

This week Canada welcomed 42 new citizens at a swearing-in ceremony here in Halifax. How many of you have attended such an occasion? I have been privileged to be present at two of these ceremonies and I found both deeply moving. 

Priest and author Thomas Kempis wrote, “We usually know what we can do, but temptation reveals just who we are.”

Clarence Jordan was a scholar, preacher and farmer, someone with two doctorates, one in Agriculture and one in Greek, you may have heard of him, he penned The Cotton Patch Gospels, a unique translation of the New Testament, putting the original Greek into the southern vernacular .

A fact few church goers seem to know; the earliest written texts in the New Testament are not the four Gospels, they are instead Paul’s letters to various churches. The Gospels came later, which explains the inconsistencies, the differences in the way each tell the same story, in the stories some include while other writers leave out.

In 2010 I was asked to join a unique national committee of the United Church of Canada. Selected were lay leaders and clergy folk representing growing churches from across Canada, growing numerically that is.

I have now been at Bethany for exactly five weeks, most of that time coming in the busiest season of church life, Christmas. I have witnessed wonderful Christian community and specifically amazing gifts of the Spirit that brings a community feeling to life. 

One of the great privileges of being a Minister is that you get to meet so many people with vastly different life experiences than yourself, it stretches you and helps you to understand the human condition. Another privilege is that you get to meet people who have been transformed by faith, their faith has made the difference between life and death.

41Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. 42And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. 43When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. 

In 25 years of pastoral visitation there is one conversation that repeats itself, it goes something like this… “Kevin, what is this world coming to, this world is a mess!” Usually I let the person vent, list all the things that are not as they used to be, “we never had to lock our doors at night” being the most common lament. 

I want to thank everyone for this warm and generous welcome.

These last two “calls” I’ve received have been different than the other churches I have served. Both at St. Andrew’s and here at Bethany I feel like I know quite a bit about you and you about me. We are not strangers to one another.