Sermons & Worship (Page 35)

Genesis 32:22-32 My sister’s two year old granddaughter, Marqui, is the spitting image of my sister when she was that age, right down to the bright blue eyes and Shirley Temple blond curls.  Wendy looks at her granddaughter and says, “My DNA has landed.”  There is no telling, of course, whether Marqui will retain that eerie resemblance to her grandmother as she ages but at this moment, if you held photos of two year old Wendy next to two year…

Genesis 25:19-26 For the past couple of weeks, I have been recording bible stories and posting them to a podcast called “Summer Bible Stories for the children of the Union University Church.”  Although I am supposedly recording them for the kids, I know some adults are listening as well and frankly, many of the stories I’m telling are really more suited for adult ears than for the ears of children.  As I said to Mary Smith this past week, the…

excerpts from Genesis 24 Abraham and Sarah’s precious son Isaac, named for laughter because of the joy he brought into his parents’ life when he was born, has now hit puberty and his father has stopped laughing.  To Abraham’s dismay, Isaac is showing all the signs of awakening hormones: he’s suddenly bathing regularly, he’s hanging around the local well for hours of the day, and his normal chatter at dinner has been reduced to terse mumblings.  To add to Abraham’s…

Genesis 2:4 ff How would you define Paradise?   And I don’t mean a dictionary definition; I mean, if you were suddenly handed a ticket that said, “Destination Paradise,” what would you expect to see when you arrived?  In a book of children’s letters to God, (1) a little girl writes, “God of the earth, Hi. I want to say what a pretty world you made. The hills are great and so are the ocean waters.  I like to swim.…

Acts 11:19-26 This past year in book group, we read a book called “75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know,” and each week as we went through three or four chapters, Sally Hopkins would try to find a unifying theme between the works covered in those chapters.  Sometimes it was easy to see how each work wrestled with a similar philosophical issue — the problem of suffering, for example — but other weeks Sally had to admit she couldn’t find any…

Revelation 7:13-17, 21:1-4 On April 23rd, in Orem, Utah, 51 year old Laurel Terry died suddenly and unexpectedly leaving behind her husband Will and three sons. 1  Will was, as you can imagine, devastated and as news of his wife’s death was posted on the internet, there was an outpouring of sympathy.  Will Terry is a children’s book illustrator and has become a household name in the online art community because almost 50,000 people follow his Youtube channel and thousands more…

Revelation 5:1-10 The scripture reading is Revelation 5:1-10 and as I mentioned earlier in this sermon series, the book of Revelation is best thought of as a theatrical presentation, so today rather than reading the verses to you, I will do a re-telling of them and invite you to close your eyes and imagine the scene he describes as I talk. It is the beginning of the end.  Now that John’s vision has finished its critique of the seven churches…

Revelation 2:1-7 Last week, I preached about the ways in which our institutions and corporate lives develop certain characters that endure even when individuals within those institutions come and go.  Those corporate cultures are persistent over time and resistant to change, and consequently when that institutional culture includes injustice or inequality, it can feel like we are, to use the metaphors of the book of Revelation, battling dragons.  I left you at the end of that sermon with a promise…

Revelation 1:9-2:7 This past week, I was listening to a discussion on the radio in which one of the broadcasters was relating a story about his attic and he said, “My attic has those drop down stairs, you know the ones that you can pull down that turn into steps… what do you call them?”   The other speaker said, “I don’t know.  I think they are just called drop down attic stairs,” and then he added, “But I bet…

The Revelation to John 1:1-8 Our book group is reading a book called “75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know”.  1 We’ve been working on it for a long time because every chapter elicits so much discussion that it is hard for us to cover more than three masterpieces per week, but a little while ago, we finally reached the 20th century, and this past week were introduced to the work of French composer Olivier Messiaen who wrote his most famous work…