This is The Slow Apprenticeship — a four-week series for the Sundays of July, recorded with our parish in Hamilton.

Over these four weeks we sit with the kingdom parables of Matthew 13, paired with the unfolding story of Jacob in Genesis. We're listening for what it means to apprentice to Jesus over a lifetime — slowly, patiently, in a culture that has lost the patience for slow things.

Our anchor for the series is a sentence from the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "Above all, trust in the slow work of God." That trust is what we're learning to walk in.

The kingdom begins not with performance but with a quiet yes to Jesus. We open the series in Matthew 11, where Jesus offers the most counter-cultural invitation of his ministry: come and learn from me. Three Greek words — yoke, easy, re ...