Sermons
Let’s talk rocks
Today was an opportunity to stroll down memory lane. Our Lectionary texts had us in 1 Peter and the passage where we are called living stones, which was the name of a youth choir that I sang in a number of years ago. There is more detail in the sermon so give it a listen for that part. We are called living stones in the edifice that is the church,…
Sheep, shepherd, they seem to come up a lot
Sheep and shepherd metaphors abound in the Bible. I’m not making any pronouncements but I have probably preached about anything that abounds in the Bible more than once and sheep and shepherds are certainly not an exception to this. So if I have preached about these before why not give in and preach about Mother’s Day today? There are two answers to that question. First, as far as I can…
Why didn’t I recognize . . .
Almost all of us have had that moment where we were near a celebrity or someone famous (or infamous), perhaps an athlete, and were completely unaware of who they were. It is only later when someone tells us who the person was or we replay the interaction in our heads that we have that forehead-smacking moment and exclaim, “So that’s who that was!” If we are so inclined we will…
I doubt that. Wait! What?
Doubt. Doubts. We all have them. We might doubt that our employer cares about our future. We might doubt that our friends actually like us. We might doubt that the government is honest and serves us. We can even have doubts about God. Do these doubts make us bad people? It is all too easy to fall into the trap that says that it does. The good news is that…
Between two extremes
This is the beginning of Holy Week. In other times and other places this Sunday would be Palm Sunday, pure and simple. In this time and this place (and many others) this is Palm / Passion Sunday. Our schedules of work and other responsibilities have made a traditional Good Friday service virtually impossible for most folks so this Sunday is a conflation of Palm Sunday and Good Friday. This is…
Death doesn’t have to equal the end
The Lectionary texts for this week all seem to revolve around death and resurrection, which makes them especially appropriate for Lent I suppose. As I reflected on them the more I came to see a theme of death as ending; not death as the end of life but rather death as a metaphor for the end of . . . anything, including hope.* This reflection led me further to look…
A priori for everyone!
The Lectionary texts for this week led me to deliver a sermon titled “Blind? Or just not seeing?” It seems almost beyond belief that anyone would choose to be physically blind but many of us choose willful blindness in what we think, believe, support or do. With these sermons I am trying to get us to seriously consider how vital it is for us to examine our blind spots (for…
Are you thirsty? I am!
So how many of us know what it means to be thirsty, not the “I just ate a bag of chips and now I’m thirsty” but the real thing? I’m willing to guess that not a lot of us have experience actual, real thirst. There aren’t all that many things that we require for life but water is one of them. Thirst is what alerts us to our need for…
Metaphors matter!
Whether we like it or not, we live our lives by metaphors. met•a•phor (mĕtˈə-fôrˌ, -fər) n. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world’s a stage” ( Shakespeare). n. One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol: “Hollywood has always been an irresistible,…
Yippee!
Today is the first Sunday in Lent, so you may be wondering what is with a blog title like “Yippee!”? Lent is misunderstood. There is a tendency to look at Lent as a time where the whole point is to be miserable. You run into people who are giving things up for Lent just to give something up. Lent is one of the very few seasons in the church year…