Sermons
What’s the opposite of servant?
I have been struck lately, as I am sure is obvious, by the limitations of our tendency toward unhelpful binary thinking. So this Sunday I just lay it out in these two sermons where I think the limitations are using John 15:9-17 as my case study. This passage of scripture has lots of really great things going on but I wanted to focus on verse 15, “ I do not call…
Let’s talk vines
When I say, “Let’s talk vines” it most emphatically is not because I know much, if anything about them. My mother was an excellent gardener as are a number of my other relatives but if that is a genetic trait, I apparently mutated it out of my DNA. The sermons this week come from one of the very well known texts in John, another one of the “I am” statements…
Shepherds all!
I don’t often use sermon titles as blog post titles but I am this week because I can’t think of any clever variation on it and I like it. I have added the addition of an exclamation point however so I guess that might be considered a variation I suppose. This Sunday we looked at several of the many, many passages of scripture that deal with sheep and shepherds. As…
Peace
“Peace be with you” was the functional equivalent in Jesus’ time of “Hello” or perhaps “How are you doing?” so it hardly seems worth spending any time talking about his use of it in today’s Gospel lesson (Luke 24:36b-48) . . . so why did I? Not only did I mention it in both sermons, the title was “Peace be with you” and it is virtually all I talked about….
The best day of the year!
Today is the best day of the year. It is better than my birthday, than my anniversary, than any other day . . . today is Easter Sunday. I’m quite used to getting sideways looks from people, especially children when I say this and point out that the chocolate is not what makes it the best. Today is the best day of the year because this is the day when…
An interesting combination of days
This Sunday is called Palm / Passion Sunday. It is a response to the undeniable fact that most people do not find it convenient, and sometimes not even possible, to observe Holy Week; frequently not even Good Friday. So the good people who work out the Liturgical calendar and the Lectionary took what had been Palm Sunday and added the Monday to Saturday portions of Holy Week to it in…
Well if we have to
It is Lent and so far we haven’t really talked about dying. Not that I think that is all that Lent is about nor do I particularly enjoy talking about dying but “if we have to . . .” Our Gospel lesson this Sunday is John 12:20-33 which contains this verse “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just…
Let’s talk about grace
Grace is one of those things that I can talk about for a long time. I came into a preliminary understanding of grace much later than some people might have supposed. It wasn’t until after I finished my undergrad degree in theology, of all things, that I began to gain a visceral understanding rather than a simple (and even simplistic) academic understanding. I knew, at some level, that grace was…
The scandal of the cross
The title of this blog post only shows up in one of the sermons (I think) and is drawn from the 1 Corinthians reading for this Sunday, 1 Cor 1:18-25. There is something so fundamentally wrong with the cross if we don’t understand it for what it was; the way, the only way, to God. Paul writes that the cross is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1…
Promises, promises, promises
This Sunday we were looking at the promises God made to Abraham and how they might possibly connect with us, after all, none of us is interested in being the parent of many nations, at least I don’t think anyone reading this is. So what’s the connection with us? What possible connection could we have with Genesis 17:4 recording God saying to Abraham (still Abram at that point) “As for…