Sermons
Revisiting a very familiar phrase
There are many familiar phrases I might be thinking about with this blog post title but the one I’m thinking about today is “once for all.” “Once for all.” What does that even mean? The context for this usage is 1 Peter 3:18 where Peter writes, “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God” (NRSV). I know…
A new perspective on a very familiar story
The story of the Transfiguration is very familiar to almost every one in a Christian church. The bare bones are that Jesus went up on a mountain with three of his disciples and while he was there Moses and Elijah came and visited Jesus and God the Father said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” A dramatic story but one that we don’t necessarily spend a lot…
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…