Sermons

Baptism is one of those things that happens at church that doesn’t always get a lot of thought. Considering how important many people think getting baptized is, this is a bit odd. In my experience, most of the discussion around baptism is about the “how” rather than the “why” of baptism. The two main “hows” of ...

No matter what some students might think, history was not invented to make middle and high school students crazy. It was George Santayana who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This is sometimes rendered as “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” No matter how ...

For those of you who faithfully listen every week and are wondering what is going on, I have an explanation. The elders graciously granted me this Sunday, December 25, 2022. Christmas Day, off as a) many people in both congregations would be gone; and, b) it is very important to them that my family does not ...

If it seems fitting to begin Advent with Hope, it seems equally fitting to finish Advent with Love. This is the Sunday of Love. One of the things I can forget about, if I’m not careful, is that while God acts in loving ways, we don’t have a God who is occasionally loving, we have a ...

The Second Sunday of Advent is the Sunday of Peace. It seems almost in poor taste to talk about peace these days. We have another shooting war in Europe, the usual hot spots in the rest of the world are continuing to try to solve things by killing, political partisanship and populism seem to be ...

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 ...