Sermons & Worship by Rev. Laurie DeMott (Page 19)

Luke 9:51-56 Over the past two weeks, our attention has been on hurricanes and our concern for those living in the path of their destruction and maybe the one good thing at come out of the hurricanes is that we managed for a short time to put aside our differences as a nation to concentrate on caring for the victims.  Nevertheless, we would be naive to think that a wind — even a hurricane force one — can blow away…

Mark 14:17-31 This past week, Hurricane Harvey pummeled Texas and parts of Louisiana leaving devastation in its wake. Our hearts have been moved by the sight of so many people who have lost family members, pets, and homes; whose communities have been destroyed and know that even as the waters recede, they will face years of recovery from the deluge of Harvey. Inevitably, even as the country rallies to help the victims in the hurricane’s path, officials debate and evaluate…

John 4:5-30 It is high noon, in a country where it begins to get hot as soon as the sun crests over the hill at dawn. By high noon, the waves of heat radiate off the parched land and most sane people are inside the cool of their homes. Perhaps that is where the Samaritan woman wishes to be, but instead she is shuffling her feet near Jacob’s well outside the village of Sychar where she has gone to fill…

Micah 6:8 Normally, I try to think of an opening introduction to my sermon that will catch your attention, but this week I only need four words: “Let’s talk about Charlottesville.” In fact, that’s all most of us have been doing all week — talking and thinking about Charlottesville and the frightening pictures of white supremacists marching through its streets last Saturday. Even some of the most ardent free speech proponents have been disturbed by the groups who would use…

Acts 17:16-34 It is the summer of 2001 and I am in Athens, Greece standing at the foot of the Areopagus. Stone steps carved into its side lead to the summit of the hill, and though the stairs aren’t long, I walk up them slowly because the steps are slick having been worn by the feet of the thousands of tourists who have preceded me. When I consider the density of the granite beneath my feet, I marvel at the…

Psalm 150 This past week, I had the most ordinary day:  I had to go to the grocery store so I drove to Hornell and everyone on the roads drove a reasonable speed and not once did I think to myself, “What a dangerous driver!”  When I reached the grocery store, a man entering before me held the door and waited for me to go through first.  The store was a bit crowded but everyone moved politely out of each…

Psalm 30 One of the iconic figures of American history, Daniel Boone, was a frontiersman who in the late 1700s helped settle parts of the wilderness that we now know today as Kentucky and Tennessee. Boone wandered over huge swaths of forest land in the Appalachian Mountain range and he blazed a path through the Cumberland Gap that allowed more than 200,000 pioneers to follow after him and settle the town of Boonesborough, one of the first white settlements west…

Psalm 46 I am preaching a 4 week series on the psalms of which this is week two. The Psalms have had a central place in both Jewish and Christian worship for thousands of years and Jesus himself undoubtedly recited the same psalms in his synagogue as we recite today. The psalms were originally written in Hebrew but after Alexander the Great hellenized the ancient world in the 300s BC, many Jews used a Greek translation of the scriptures and…

Psalm 13 In small churches across America, congregations constantly ask, “How can we get more young people to come to church?”  They look at their graying members and worry that they are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the next generation and so they discuss how they can make their worship life more palatable to youth, how they can preach a gospel message that will resonate with people just starting out in their adult lives. I recently heard, however, a member of…

Galatians 5:22-26 Have you ever had anyone tell you that they needed to “find their voice?”  If so, the person was probably not referring to a case of laryngitis but rather to a kind of inner exploration.  This phrase, “finding your voice,” has been adopted in the self-help literature to define the process of exploring one’s desires, talents, and passions in order to create a life that is fulfilling and singular, unique to you.  Steven Covey, author of The Seven…