Category: Sermons

Psalm 144 is a Passover psalm and no doubt that is why the lectionary uses it at Easter. It celebrates the physical events from the Exodus out of Egypt and the desert wanderings in a poetic way – the Red Sea looked and ran away, the river Jordan stopped in its tracks, the mountains skipped like goats and the hills...

What river runs through your life? Maybe you lived by it.  Maybe you holidayed beside it. What did your river teach you? This is the Tawa Union Church logo.  I am told it is a depiction of a braided river.  What does the logo represent for us?  What does it say about who we are and what we value? I...

You know the story of the Emperor’s new clothes. The Emperor was a very vain man.  He loved fine clothes.  A parade was coming up on his Imperial calendar; it was time to get a new outfit.  So tailors were invited to come up with something that was fit for an Emperor. Two confidence tricksters, who knew of the Emperor’s...

We have heard the story of Esther- the courageous wife and queen. We have heard the story of Ruth, the loyal and loving daughter in law. Today we come to the story of Mary, a woman who is famous for being a mother – the mother of Jesus. Amid Catholic and orthodox circles Mary receives a lot more attention than...

It had been a bad day… a really bad day.  When Ella thought about it, it was hard to think of anything that had gone right.  She had woken up late, and by the time she got down to breakfast her little brother had eaten the last of the Coco Pops, and that had meant that Ella had had to...

I worked with university students for a while. I can remember reading over an essay for an overseas student once to check his grammar. It was an economics essay from memory. It was full of unnecessarily big words! Even more than a subject like economics would normally use. It was as though he had gone to the thesaurus and picked...

Recently a baby was brought into the Waikato Hospital A&E. It had been knocked around in its own home.  Because of the severity of its injuries it was transferred to Starship Hospital in Auckland.  A few days later it died.  It was 9 months old.

Ann Henry was born in the Deep South in 1879.  Her father was a saw miller.  She was educated at the local school and then at Riverton District High School. She became a teacher and was heavily involved in Sunday School and Bible Class movements.  By the turn of the century she had moved to the North Island, and in...