Sermons
Another taboo talked about
I think it was last week that I mentioned that we are not supposed to talk about religion or politics . . . well there is another thing we aren’t supposed to talk about and that is money. Soooo, this week I preached about money. By the way, I am not on some sort of taboo-busting, taboo-discussing trend, I go where the Lectionary leads as much as possible and sometimes…
Politics? Yes I went there, but not how you might have thought
I know, I know, I know. The two topics you should never talk about are religion and politics. Now I am more or less forced to talk about the former but to bring the latter in too . . . well, what was I thinking? What I was thinking, was a slightly different take on 1 Timothy 2:1,2. I have always been slightly uncomfortable with this passage. I get that…
Stop being so binary!
I like logical fallacies. Well, let me clarify. I don’t like “doing” logical fallacies. I like recognizing them and knowing that they have names and cool things like that. Heather is much better at identifying logical fallacies when they pop up, as they do so often in public discourse, but I find my fair share. There are all sorts of logical fallacies out there, some of the more common are:…
A micro primer on hermeneutics
This Sunday’s sermons come from the Lectionary’s Gospel lesson, which is taken from Luke, in fact Luke 14:25-33 (click here for the texts). The actual title of the sermons is “Hyperbole” and what I was attempting to do was to provide some guidance into how we interpret, or at least hear, the hyperbolic statements and stories; especially from Jesus. Dealing with hyperbole is just one part of hermeneutics, which is…
Does what we do matter?
BREAKING As noted in my last post, I have no idea why there are two media players showing, at least in some browsers, so if the first one you try doesn’t work try again, or even again. Sorry for this, I’ll have to check with my blog consultant and try to get this fixed. Until such time as I get this fixed, if you click here, you will be taken…
Do I dare address hypocrisy?
Well the short answer is that I do dare. Hypocrisy is one of the more fraught topics that frequently comes up. Much like my introduction to preaching on prayer, there are all the same potential problems preaching about prayer; there is such pressure to be perfect in relation to the topic. If there is pressure to have a perfect prayer life, the pressure to never practice hypocrisy is even greater!…
More thinking? Really?
You may be wondering why we are doing more thinking about faith, although quite possibly you aren’t. Faith is one of those extremely large topics that can be thought about and talked about with profit for a very, very long time. Today’s sermons are a little wide ranging but one of the points I am trying to address is the absurdity of subjecting “faith,” in particular religious faith, to all…
Let’s talk about faith . . .
Finally! Caught up, here’s hoping I won’t have to ever do that again. This week we are in Hebrews 11, the “Faith chapter” as it was often called when I was in Bible school, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that we are talking about faith. What makes this week’s sermons interesting is that the title is very much what they are, i.e. “Let’s talk about faith ….
A new mindset, or at least a new setting
This post covers the sermons for August 4 (still behind, still catching up but in the current month; yippee!). One of the more peculiar things that Paul asks us to do is to “set our minds on things above.” Perhaps “peculiar” is too strong a word but it is at least odd that we would be asked to set our minds on things above. How will it help us to…
Prayer, persistence and preaching
These are the sermons from July 28 (still catching up obviously) and it is an opportunity to think about prayer. Prayer is a tricky thing to talk about but it is always worth visiting or re-visiting. When the Lectionary includes Jesus talking about prayer in two different ways, as he does in Luke 11:1-13, the need to address it becomes pretty compelling. What makes Jesus’ words so interesting in his…