Rev Chris Roth

Jacob’s name comes from the word for “heel”. Jacob was a twin and when he was born he was grasping his brother Esau’s heel, as if he was hoping to pull him back into the womb so he could be the firstborn of the twins. That moment defined his relationship with his twin brother. He desired to supplant and to overtake his brother. We spoke last week about how Jacob manipulated his starving brother, Esau, into selling him his inheritance for a bowl of stew. Then we spoke about how Jacob stole his brother’s blessing by cooking a meal and tying goat hair to his arms to fool his nearly blind father, Isaac, into believing he was his brother, Esau. Isaac gave him the blessing reserved for the firstborn to be spoken before he died. Esau was rightly furious to have all of his birthright pulled out from under him by his trickster brother, so Jacob fled for his life because Esau was planning to kill him. Jacob flees under the guise of finding himself a wife.      ...

Hear the sermon here Gen 28 :10-19 When we meet up with Jacob in our Old Testament reading we find him at a very low point. His twin brother Esau was technically the firstborn and so he was the one who had the claim on the inheritance of their father Isaac. The two brothers were very different, even though they were twins. Esau was an athletic hunter. He was a hairy man. He was an outdoorsman and seemed to be someone who had intense emotions and was perhaps a bit of an extrovert. Jacob was a quiet man and was more comfortable indoors cooking and sticking closer to home. There seems to have been a bit of competition between them. One day Esau came back from being in the field and was very hungry. We don’t know how long he was gone. He may have been out hunting for a week, or maybe he was just out for the afternoon, but either way he felt like he was starving. He smelled what Jacob was cooking and asked for some. But instead of offering his starving brother some of the s...

Read the Scripture here Hear the sermon here Deciding to move to Toronto so I could go to seminary was a big decision that came with lots of things to plan and lots of things we could worry about. We had very little money, and we weren’t completely sure how things were going to work. We had a yard sale and sold most of our furniture and a lot of our belongings.  We weren’t exactly sure what we were going to do about furniture once we got to Toronto. I was pretty sure that was what God was calling me to do, so we moved ahead in trust. One day about a week before we were flying to Toronto I got a phone call. The voice on the other line said, “I understand you are moving into one of the apartments at Wycliffe College. Well the previous renter left a lot of furniture in the apartment. Did you want us to move it out so you can move yours in, or can you use any of it?” So we let him know that anything he wanted to leave we would use because we were coming with nothing. Befor...

Hear the sermon here One of the oldest temptations the church faces is fragmentation. We are constantly and continuously tempted to walk away from each other. In university I took a class on Christian history. My professor, Dr. Robinson, held up a book that listed all the known Christian denominations, which at that time numbered at somewhere over 20,000. Many of these denominations consisted of only one church. He then told us his two favorite churches/denominations. One was “the Church of God on Turtle Hill”, the other (in the same town) was “The True Church of God on Turtle Hill”.  It’s amazing how a whole history can be imagined in the one word “true”. You can imagine there was some sort of a disagreement that happened. It could have been over something theological- like how faith and works determine your salvation. But, it might also have been the result of an argument about the color of the carpet. Whatever it was it caused a division in the church and there arose “T...

Read the Scripture here Genesis 21:8-21 Hear the sermon here Genesis begins with God creating a beautiful world. It is a world where human beings live in harmony with each other, with animals, with creation, and with God. It is the world we were all created to live in. It is a world where our talents and capacities find their perfect match, and where we would know work but not toil. It is a world of continuous and developing contemplation of the infinite God and the bliss that goes along with it. The first couple, we are told, eat from the forbidden tree. It is a rejection of God’s leadership. They have decided that they know better. They eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and bad, and to gain knowledge of the “bad” they must leave paradise. This is what we know as the Fall. To bring human beings back into full relationship with Him, God puts in motion a plan. That plan begins with a man and his wife- Abraham and Sarah. In their old age God calls them away from t...

Hear the sermon here There is a threenesss to Christian worship. We read in our Gospel reading today the command to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). In Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan river the voice of God is heard and the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus like a dove (Luke 3). There is a threeness about Jesus’ baptism. From Paul we receive the blessing “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” (2 Cor 13:13). There is a threeness to Christian worship. Some might this this is a bit strange. The first Christians were all Jewish. They never actually believed they were a part of a new religion. They believed they were a part of a further development of Judaism. To them the Messiah has now come, but they still considered themselves Jews. One of the things that set Judaism apart from other religions that surrounded them was that they believed in the worship of on...

Acts 2 Hear the sermon here We have to rewind a little. We have been looking at the books of Acts and what happened to some of the disciples after the day of Pentecost, which was a Jewish festival that happened 50 days after Passover. The day of Pentecost resulted in Peter preaching to the crowd that resulted in numerous people following Jesus and living as a new community. Eventually this community catches the attention of the leadership that had Jesus killed and Stephen is stoned. One of those approving of Stephen’s stoning was Paul and after encountering the risen Jesus he starts preaching about Jesus to anyone who will listen. All this starts with the day of Pentecost.             The preacher John Stott said, “As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead”. The Spirit is the life of the church. The goal of the Christian life is to love and serve God and through this we enter a shar...