Sermons

Father Christmas, so it is said, only brings presents to boys and girls who have been good.

And Jesus, many people suspect, is not so very different from Father Christmas. In particular, he wants people to be good, If you want to know Jesus, there are standards to maintain, especially if you want to stay in his good books, be a proper member of his church.

Today, we’re going to talk about the problem of evil.

I don’t mean the philosophical problem of evil. There’s no shortage of questions about that. If God made the world good, where did the devil come from? Why does God let good things happen to bad people? What exactly is evil? Why does God not stamp out the badness in the world right away?

Jesus would have made a terrible salesman.

At times, it almost seems as if he’s trying to put people off from following him.

Bible passages like this are hard to preach from. I’m instinctively a salesman. I’d love everyone to follow Jesus. I want to sell him to people. I want everyone I know to sign on the dotted line. So passages like this are a bit of a nuisance. Jesus takes the small print, and makes it the largest writing on the page, with bright highlighter pen through it. It makes it much harder to sell Jesus to people when it feels like you’re putting them off.

He wasn’t the obvious person, and he knew it. The trouble was, he was also desperate.

The centurion was a powerful Roman soldier. Technically, he was supposed to command a hundred Roman troops. That alone was a prestigious position in the mighty Roman army. If one of his soldiers disobeyed him, they were disobeying the emperor. Truth be told, though, it wasn’t exactly a hundred. In this backwater of the empire, he could basically recruit his own men. He’d lost count of exactly how many were under his command.