|
For retired Reverend Dr. Alex Lawson, Christmas and Easter sermons are particularly special because they reflect a kind, loving God who believes people are born good rather than bad, contrary to what many people grow up believing.
And obviously something about his sermons resonated with a lot of people because he started receiving requests to publish them. The result is “To Light a Penny Candle,” which was released in November, and has been so popular, it is already about to enter its third printing of 1,000 copies.
“I’ve had calls all the way from Quebec from people saying how much joy the sermons brought them,” said Lawson, a Scotsman who has been a coal miner, a professional bagpipe player and a psychotherapist as well as a minister.
Most of the sermons come from his days preaching at McKillop United Church in Lethbridge from 1978-91. He continues to occasionally preach in Lethbridge and regularly in Waterton, where he will be for Christmas.
He said one sermon, “The Elephant in the Living Room,” was paraphrased for a pamphlet for Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission (AADAC).
“But they took all of the references to God out of it and my name so it was a very truncated version of it,” he said.
That is one of his favourites in the book along with the first sermon, “A God Who Visits,” in which he talks about a 1948 coal-mine explosion.
It’s the Christmas and Easter sermons that were always particularly special to him, he said.
“The greatest stories ever are the Christmas and Easter stories. They are so filled with poetry and symbolism. There is just so much joy around them.”
Lawson moved to Canada from Scotland in the early ’70s and got a job as a professional piper.
“I was living in one of the roughest areas of Montreal. There were old people cooking their dinners on two-burner stoves,” he said.
He wanted to help these people so he enrolled in the seminary school at McGill University.
Midway through his degree, he learned of two psychotherapists who were trying to help them.
“These two men looked for the good in people. Their intention was to love people into wholeness,” he said.
That prompted him to become a therapist as well, though he doesn’t like to use the term therapist “because that suggests people have something wrong with them,” he noted.
He later moved to Moose Jaw, where he founded the Family Life Centre there, before moving to Lethbridge.
Lawson usually wrote his Sunday sermons the Saturday night before, though they gestated within him throughout the week.
He also had to juggle writing his sermons between performing a plethora of wedding services.
“One year, I had 83 weddings to do, so I’d write the sermons in between them,” he said.
Lawson is working on a second book of sermons — this one including more pastoral sermons, which he says are “more applicable to people’s lives.”
“I’ve been fortunate to come to Canada and go to McGill and get a great education and be able to draw on my own background,” he said.
“Preaching is an art form. It means I can say more when I’m preaching than I can ordinarily. I’m wiser than I know I am when I’m preaching.”
Readers will find there is a lot of Celtic spirituality in the sermons. “Some people believe you need God to save them from hell and damnation whereas in Celtic spirituality you need God’s grace to regain moral goodness,” he said.
Lawson has always looked at God as a “loving, gracious God,” rather than a vengeful God, which comes through in his sermons along with stories from his own life and stories from his youth, such as coal-mining disasters.
“God doesn’t cause these disasters; stupidity does. It was the greed of the owners and the stupidity of the ground-level supervisors.”
The book includes an introduction written by Dr. Bryan Tyson.
“They are quite readable,” Lawson said of the sermons included in the book. “I have a friend who is quite a skeptic. He told me he reads one of them every morning.”
Copies of the book are available by phoning Lawson at 403-328-9277. |
