On the second Sunday of Advent we anticipate and celebrate the promise that Jesus, the Prince of Peace, has come to bring peace into the world. In the face of so much hubris, greed, polarization, division, and war around the globe, the promise of peace might seem a distant and elusive dream.

I just returned from a trip to England visiting towns northeast of London – where my mother’s relatives lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – searching for churches where they had worshiped before their immigration to the New World.

In Churchland there is a natural tendency to look to churches that appear successful, hoping to learn from or emulate what they are doing in our own communities.

If you’re near my age, or older, you likely remember seeing this photo in a newspaper in June 1972, probably on page one.

“My soul longs, indeed, it faints for the courts of the Lord”

Psalm 84 is a psalm of longing or lament, and it is also a psalm of pilgrimage. Three times a year the people were commanded to make a pilgrimage to the temple to appear before the Lord (Exodus 23:14–17).

As someone who has spent several decades in Church-land, I've heard literally thousands of sermons, homilies, and meditations. Too often, I hear preachers representing Jesus as someone who was uncomfortable with Judaism.

At the beginning of March, the Angus Reid Institute ran a poll surveying those who were anticipating a return to work. The poll revealed that after two years of working at home many employees aren’t sure that they want to return to the office.

During the 1960s, which were a decade of upheaval in western Christianity in general, the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC) registered some fundamental changes in its worship, theology, ecumenical outlook, discipline, and cultural inclusiveness.  

The atmospheric river that came was truly an inundation. Torrential rain for days caused mudslides, rivers to swell and burst their banks, roads and bridges to dissolve into nothing, and waters suddenly rising to dangerous levels and consuming homes, farms, and land.