Sermons
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…
Reign of Christ
Today is the last Sunday of the year! I love the liturgical year and how it is different than the calendar year, it reminds me that there is so much that is more important than dates. The year ends with a bang, with Christ the King Sunday, or Reign of Christ Sunday depending on which you want to call it, which is great but . . . The “but” that…
But I want to know when?
There is something in all of us that wants to know when things are going to happen. We want to know for all sorts of reasons ranging from a desire to plan better to simple curiosity and everything in between. With this in mind it shouldn’t surprise us too much that there are lots of people who want to know when the second coming of Jesus is going to happen….
Being and doing and all that
This is the last Sunday where there are two completely different (at least that was the intention) sermons in the one post. The Knox Presbyterian sermon is a meditation on how much we are different than the first century “teachers of the law” and Pharisees; those groups of hyper-religious folks that Jesus had so many run-ins with. This being a sermon it more or less requires some sort of twist…
Reformation Sunday
This Sunday has two sermons again but both of them take quite a bit of direction from the Reformation Sunday designation. When I was looking into why this Sunday is Reformation Sunday I was reminded that Martin Luther posted his 95 questions on the church door on October 31 so Reformation Sunday is the last Sunday before October 31, just when you think you know everything . . . ….