Sermons & Worship by Rev. Laurie DeMott

Scripture: Matthew 13:52 First of all, I want to thank the Centennial Committee for inviting me to be a part of worship today. It’s been wonderful to see you all again and to have the chance to play bells (one of my favorite things) and to sing with the Bluegrass Band. Last night’s dinner program was a lot of fun and Dave Porter and the Committee should be commended for the amount of work that went into the night, especially…

Scripture: I Corinthians 3:5-9 One of the exercises that ministers often use when they get writer’s block is to try to imagine that the sermon they are working on is the last sermon they will ever preach.  Supposedly this exercise helps us to clear out all of our extraneous distracting thoughts and get right to the heart of our message driving our writing through a sense of urgency.  I find, however, that knowing this is the last sermon I am…

Scripture: I John 4:7-12 The title of my sermon is “That’s Just the Kind of God I Am,” and what I am about to preach is the foundation for everything that I have said to you over the last 38 years.  So if you haven’t been listened to any of the rest of my sermons, listen now.     In the early 1900’s, the Austrian philosopher and social reformer, Rudolf Steiner, founded the Waldorf school, a new approach to education…

Scripture: Zephaniah 3:14-18; Luke 2:10-11 When I was a child, my church didn’t celebrate Advent.  We were Baptists and at the time, Advent was considered something that only high liturgical churches did and there was the feeling that if we celebrated Advent, the next thing you knew, we’d be burning incense and chanting psalms in Latin. By the time I was a teenager, however, my church had decided that recognizing Advent might be a way of saving Christmas from the materialism…

Scripture: Isaiah 9:2-7 “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given… And he shall be called ‘Prince of peace.’” As most of you know, I studied Biology as an undergraduate student but after receiving my Bachelor degree, I changed course and went into seminary for my graduate studies. It was 1980 and I was the tender age of 22 when I entered Colgate Rochester Divinity School and most of my classmates were also fresh out of…

Scripture: Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 8:24-25 Today is the beginning of Advent and one of my annual Advent traditions is to read The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. There are now enough televised versions of it that in a busy year, I will cheat and watch it instead of reading it but none of the televised versions capture the full liveliness of Dicken’s writing, such as this wonderful passage early in the story when Ebenezer Scrooge expresses his sentiments about the…

Scripture: Revelation 1:4-9 Every year, as Thanksgiving approaches, the refrain “All is safely gathered in,” runs constantly through my brain. Beginning in October, I start checking off the items on my winter preparation list: the snowblower must get its tune-up, my car must have snow tires; I have to compost the pond plants and replace them with a small heater to keep my goldfish from freezing solid in January; there are lawn chairs to put away, gardens to tidy up,…

Scripture: Romans 8:31-39 On the bookshelf in my living room, taking up nearly an entire shelf, is my twelve-volume set of the New Interpreter’s Bible, commentaries on all 66 books of the Bible containing biblical analysis and suggestions for preaching themes and reflections. Right next to those 12 volumes taking up the rest of the space on that shelf is a three-volume set of the Complete Calvin and Hobbes, all of the comics that Bill Watterson wrote over the ten-year…

Scripture: I Corinthians 12:12-14, 25-26 When I was growing up, one of the stories we liked to hear my mother tell was the story of how she and my father met. When he was a senior in high school, my father was the President of the Monroe County American Baptist youth fellowship, and my mother’s older sister (my Aunt Jean) was vice-president of the Youth fellowship. My Aunt Jean had a terrible crush on my father, but my father was…

Scripture: I Corinthians 1:1-9  I want to talk to you today about salvation which I know will immediately make some of you squirm uncomfortably. We mainline Christians don’t like to talk about salvation much because the word has been so misused that it makes us uncomfortable. It reeks of the street corner evangelist who suggests that all you have to do is say the words, “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,” and you will get a free…