Sermons
Who should we be?
I don’t often open this sort of thing with a quotation but for this week, I am. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. Ralph Waldo Emerson* The reason for putting that quotation in is that today’s sermons are about who we should be when we relate to other people. As I mention in at least one of the sermons,…
Some things are hard
I know that the title of this blog post is one that could be taken several ways. I hasten to add that this is not a “tell-all” post where I relate things that are going on in my life that are hard (I’m not promising that I won’t write such a post in the future, this just isn’t one). This Sunday’s sermons are about us dealing with some of the…
God calling . . . for reals
I know I should probably apologize for this post’s title but I just couldn’t resist it, and as I obviously did it on purpose, an apology would be at best disingenuous . . . so I won’t. But besides pulling the nose of language purists* everywhere what could be going on here? This week’s sermons are my attempt to help us take seriously the notion that God still calls people…
Baptism
So this Sunday is the Baptism of the Lord Sunday in the liturgical / lectionary year. This can be a problematic Sunday because it forces us to address one of those odd things in the Bible, namely, Jesus’ baptism. This is odd for at least a couple of reasons, first of all, we have John the Baptist to deal with and he was one odd duck all by himself. Second,…
Nature vs nurture
Okay I admit it, I’m having a bit of fun with the blog post title this week. I did not preach on the age-old question of how we are like we are; I do not take one side over the other when it comes to nature and nurture as I think it is as much a mug’s game as “picking” between predestination and free will.* The sermons this week take…
It is still Christmas!
There are so many things to like about paying attention to the liturgical year and one of them, that I am sure I have mentioned before, is the Christmas isn’t just one day. This year there are two Sundays after Christmas Day. Two Sundays where we get to sing Christmas carols and songs and think about Christmas and what it means. So why did I end up preaching out of…
Everybody does it
So today was the shortest day of the year. I wish I would have remembered that when I was preaching I think I might have been able to do something with that. You might be wondering what “it” is that everybody does . . . I wasn’t trying to be provocative but just inclusive. What everybody does is wait. This week’s sermons are about waiting and what it can do…
Thoughts on “joy”
This Sunday’s sermons take a bit of a different look at “joy” and do so through first spending some time thinking about what the word means and for that matter what words mean at all. There is a perverse tendency in our culture to take good and useful words and make them useless. Most of my thinking in this matter was stimulated by a small bit from the introduction to…
Context is everything
The title of this blog post was originally going to be something about relativity but then I thought that “context” might capture the essence of these sermons a bit better. We have arrived at the second week of Advent and for some this might be the hardest week to make it through, Christmas is still so far away. The first week can pass on novelty and the third week is…
Jesus Is Coming!
The new church year has begun and with it I wanted us to think about the both / and of Jesus coming to earth. He came once but he was pretty clear that he is going to come again. When we celebrate the season of Advent it is easy to get so caught up in getting ready for Christmas that we forget all about his other coming. Don’t get me…