Welcome to Wycliffe College

On Saturday March 3rd, Professor Sider-Hamilton preached the sermon at Wycliffe's annual Open House.

The entire text of the sermon can be view or downloaded below.  Here is an excerpt from the sermon:

"We’re thinking today about vocation: how you might hear God’s call; what it might mean for you to serve God. Mark’s gospel suggests that it all begins with Jesus at the Jordan; with death, and with life, and with a world changed.

Jesus bursts onto the scene in Mark’s gospel with the force of cataclysm. Heaven is torn open; God speaks; Satan and the Spirit both stalk the wilderness. It is a scene of cosmic scope and a world changed, in which the Spirit may be seen and the voice of God heard, and Satan bares his claws.

It is the time of Jeremiah’s promise: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. In those days, the children will no longer suffer for the parents’ sins, and “just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down…so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord.” (Jer 31:27-30)

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan by John.

This is the time of the new creation, breaking out in the backwater of Galilee, and Jesus is at the centre of it all."