Sermons

The First Sunday of Advent is the Sunday of hope. Hope is one of those things we sometimes forget about but is vital to our well-being. The sermon asks the question is there always hope? The answer is a resounding Yes! But it may not be exactly what we are looking at. Our texts direct us ...

Yes it is this Liturgical year’s last Sunday. Next Sunday we begin again with the First Sunday of Advent. The last Sunday of the church year is called either the Reign of Christ Sunday or Christ the King Sunday and it provides us an opportunity to consider what it might mean for Jesus to be ...

Today is Remembrance Sunday. I know it is quite a few days before November 11 but I think it is important to have the Sunday devoted to Remembrance Day before the actual day rather than after. The sermon isn’t as specific to Remembrance Day as some I have preached but there are still some tie-ins, at ...

We humans seem to have some sort of built-in compulsion to know “why?” As someone once commented, “we want to know why, and we want to know why we want to know why, even though we never will” as what it means to be human. There is a subset of spiritually aware people who want to ...

I don’t like binaries and the sermon title for this Sunday is deliberately chosen to highlight binaries . . . so I can redefine these two as ends of a continuum. The primary text for the sermon is Luke 18:9-14, a passage frequently called the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. It is ...

Scripture. Holy Writ. The Bible. What do we do with it? I am sure even asking the question, “What do we do with Scripture?” makes some people uncomfortable. The goal isn’t to make anyone feel uncomfortable but to ask the question and mean it! What do we do with Scripture? Do we take every word literally? ...

Endurance. The very word strikes fear into the hearts of many of us. We don’t like to be put in a position to endure, at least I don’t. I want to be in a position where the only thing I can do is thrive . . . preferably without too much work on my part. However, ...

Faith is one of those words we can use quite well without necessarily being able to define it. There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way, peace be upon my English teachers who tried to teach me otherwise. Being able to use a word correctly, and even elegantly, does not require you to be able ...

There is an old bit by George Carlin, the standup comedian, about “stuff.” If you remember it, this Sunday’s sermons are not drawn from it . . . at least not intentionally. I talked about “stuff” today because it is important to think about the stuff in our lives. Stuff is our possessions of course but ...

I kick off both sermons with a statement something to the effect of, ‘there are some difficult words in Scripture,” and there are. However, I am not talking about those words difficult to translate from Hebrew, Greek, and very occasionally Aramaic. I am not talking about wrestling with the Greek grammatical case able to say, ...