Sermons
The Ten Commandments revisited
It has been a long time since I spent any real time thinking about the Ten Commandments. I’m not indifferent to them or anything like that, they just haven’t come up lately. I was doing some reading about the Lectionary texts, an act which I have noticed is becoming more common this year, and something caught my eye. This section of Exodus marks the last time God, as Yahweh, spoke…
Promises
I think it is safe to say two things about promises. First, we all like them. Second, every one of us has had a broken promise (maybe we broke it, maybe the other party did). These two things work together to make us somewhat suspicious of promises. We are set up to like the idea of promises but we have all had much experience with broken promises. Generation after generation…
It’s Lent again!
It is good to be back. I have been gone the past couple of weeks as I was traveling, a work thing that was very lovely, thanks for asking 🙂 and it is very good to be back. My first Sunday back is the first Sunday in Lent (note it is the first Sunday in Lent, not the first Sunday of Lent . . . a subtle but very significant…
Love is better than knowing stuff
For a certain kind of person knowing things is really important, in the spirit of full disclosure, I am one of these people. This is fine, most of the time, the difficulty comes when they make the leap from “knowing things” to having to be correct. One of the most important, and hardest, lessons I had to learn was: “You can be right and still be wrong.” This Sunday’s sermons…
Not really about fish
 It is virtually impossible to have the book of Jonah show up in the Lectionary and not think of fish. It is even more difficult to get away from fish when the Gospel lesson involves Jesus calling some of his followers away from their vocation as people who fished for a living. However, neither of these sermons is really about fish. I hope you are not disappointed. Rather, these sermons…
Change happens
 I don’t like change. I don’t know too many people who do but I especially hate it. It could come from moving a lot when I was a kid. It come from an historical awareness that makes me suspicious of any change fulfilling its promise. It is all too possible I’m simply stodgy and lazy and change means I have to work to learn something new. Nonetheless, I don’t like…
Why did Jesus get baptized?
As I have mentioned more than once before, one of the most aggravating things about following the Lectionary is having to go over the same thing every year; also, one of the best things about the Lectionary is going over the same thing every year. Seems I’m a little conflicted. The aggravation comes from the feeling of having to come up with something “new” to say about the Trinity, or…
It’s the season for gifts
It is the season for gifts. It is easy to get caught up in gifts at the expense of everything else about this delightful time of the year. I suspect most, if not all, of us have had those Christmas seasons where we realized we were totting up what we got, what we gave, and then doing some math that can never make us happy. Almost everyone pays at least…
Not a pop song
The title for these sermons is “The look of love” which for at least some of us instantly takes us to a particular time and place, i.e. 1982 and wherever we were then. (Here is a link to the song to save you the trouble of looking it up https://youtu.be/BX1pRTK9R0s) However, I am not trying to get us to spend too much time with early pop hits but rather with…
Why are we talking about joy again?
There is a short answer and a long answer to the question posed in this post’s title. The short answer is, it is the third Sunday of Advent which is the Sunday of Joy. The longer answer begins with a short answer and then an explanation. We are talking about joy again because we forget. Every so often I run across well meaning folks from other religious traditions, usually free…