Sermons & Worship from October 2017

Excerpts from Exodus 28 Wow, as I listen to the long descriptions of the priestly garments that God orders Aaron to wear, I can’t help but think, “I’m glad I am a Protestant minister and not an Israelite priest. Those robes must have been sweltering in the desert heat, not to mention the sheer weight of all of those stones on the shoulders of the ephod and jewels on the breastplate.” The elaborate descriptions of the priest’s vestments may baffle…

Exodus 16 How much must you have to have enough?  When should you worry that you don’t have enough and when should you consider whether what you have is too much? The story of manna in the wilderness is a story about what is enough.  It is a story about scarcity and about abundance and what happens when we cannot tell the one from the other. Sometimes the question about ‘what is enough’ is easy to answer, especially when we…

Exodus 3:1-14 On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being not very much at all and 10 being extremely so, how oblivious are you? Do you suffer from inattentiveness? Do you have such terrible tunnel vision that you can never see the forest for the trees? Are you drifting through life with your head in the clouds, liable to trip over your own two feet because your mind is always elsewhere? (And if you are saying, “Wait, what was…

Genesis 17:1-8, 15-19; 18:9-15; 21:1-6 In a Calvin and Hobbes comic, Calvin says to his tiger friend Hobbes, “Isn’t it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor? When you think about it, its weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense….We think it’s funny. Don’t you think its odd that we appreciate absurdity? … How does it benefit us?” To which Hobbes replies, “I suppose if we couldn’t laugh at things that…

excerpts from Genesis 6-9 [Scripture Reading Genesis 6:5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds…