Sermons & Worship by Rev. Laurie DeMott (Page 15)

Matthew 20:1-16 In 1848, a thirteen year old boy from Scotland came to the town of Allegheny, Pennsylvania and went to work as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill for $1.20 a week.  He had no formal education but he was willing to work hard and always sought opportunities to learn new skills.  Consequently, at fourteen he became a messenger in a telegraph office, then official telegrapher to the Pennsylvania railroad, and eventually rose to be a railroad superintendent…

Genesis 4:1-16 As I have mentioned before, I maintain a database of all of the sermons I have ever preached and sometimes when I’m preaching on a certain theme or scripture, I’ll search through that database to see what I’ve said about that topic before.  Usually I conclude that I didn’t say anything helpful at all (!) but every now and then I come across a sermon that even I enjoy re-reading and that is what happened to me last week.  Last…

James 3:13-18 I was recently scrolling through the web looking for a reference when, as so often happens, an article about something entirely different caught my eye.  I don’t now remember what my original search was about because I abandoned it and instead read the article which was titled, “Can Envy Be Good for You?” 1   Envy, of course, is one of vices that we learn as Christians is among the seven deadly sins so I was intrigued to see what arguments a…

Luke 17:1-4 This past week, the news was once again full of reports about sexual abuse, about powerful men using their positions to force unwanted intimacy upon others, but this time the perpetrators of the abuse were not politicians or rich Hollywood producers; they were priests, and the people protecting them were bishops and archbishops, leaders in the church who claim to have given their lives to serving Christ.  The stories of the abuse perpetrated by these priests were horrific, disturbing,…

Colossians 1:11-17 Have you ever heard the phrase, “organizing principle?”  The phrase is quite popular with pundits, so much so that when I googled the phrase this week, my search turned up 3,480,000 web pages containing the phrase.  Obviously, I didn’t read all of those references but even a quick look at the top hits revealed a wide diversity of uses for the phrase.  A scientific paper, for example, opened with the statement, “Evolution is the organizing principle of modern biology.”  An SAT site…

Isaiah 40:28-31; Galatians 6:9-10 One of the first psalms I memorized as a child, Psalm 100, proclaimed that we should, “Serve the Lord with gladness!” and Isaiah echoes this sentiment, promising that the faithful will not faint or grow tired but will be borne aloft on eagle’s wings. Jesus said, “My yoke is easy, my burden light,” and Paul proclaims with a mighty trumpet charge, “Let us not grow weary while doing good!” We hear these scriptures and others like…

Psalm 46:1-7 In the land of Patagonia — a land east of the Andes mountains stretching down to the southernmost tip of South America and washed on its eastern coast by the waves of the South Atlantic — in the land of Patagonia, there are no trees because the desert plateaus are swept constantly by a harsh wind.  The wind carves the rock.  It creates express-lanes in the skies for soaring hawks and seabirds.  The scrub brush that clings to…

I Thessalonians 4:13-18; Luke 17:20–21 Do you remember what you were doing last September 23rd?  If it helps, it was a Saturday — the fourth Saturday in September.  Did you sleep in?  Were you working, traveling, cleaning the house?  How were you feeling that day, do you remember?  No?  How about October 21, 2011?  Any memories of that day?  It was the third Friday of the month, ten days before Halloween.  Do you remember that day or how you felt about getting up that morning?  Or what about April 29, 2007?  That…

Romans 14:7-9 For years I have been putting quotes in the bulletin based on the theme of the service and when I first began that practice, I collected quotes from my reading or looked up topics in Bartlett’s Quotations but now I get my quotes from the internet, most often from Goodreads, a site in which readers post their favorite quotes from authors they enjoy.  Though this ensures that my pool of authors is larger and more diverse than in my…

Romans 12:14-21 One Sunday, a pastor was preaching on Jesus’ command to love our enemies and he began by saying to his congregation, “I’ll bet that all of us struggle with this command and you may think you are alone but you are not.  Raise your hand if you feel you have any enemies.”  Quite a few of the people raised their hands.  “Raise your hand even if you have only a few enemies,” he continued and several more put their…