Sermons & Worship (Page 41)

John 21:1-17 Yankees catcher Yogi Berra famously said, “It’s deja vu, all over again.”  Well, here in the final chapter of the gospel of John, it’s deja vu all over again.  Peter and the other disciples are fishing, casting their nets continuously into the water only to pull them up empty time and time again throughout the night.  As the dawn breaks, a figure appears on the far shore and calls to them, “Throw your nets down on the other side,” and when…

John 20:19-31 If you are looking for games that provoke a lot of discussion, laughter, and occasionally disgust, you might want to try a game called “Would you rather?” I’ve been playing this game for years with my youth group but for those who would like to try it at home, it’s now available as an app on your phone. The game is simple: it consists of questions like, “Would you rather eat slugs or worms? Would you rather lose…

Romans 5:1-5 Hope is a frustrating thing.  Just when you need it most, it is often the hardest to find. I’ve been thinking a lot about hope lately — actually I’ve been thinking about it for the last six weeks because our Lenten theme has been the art of hope.  And so every week since Ash Wednesday, I have scoured the internet for quotes about hope to put in the bulletin.  Every week, I have done Bible searches for scriptures…

During the weeks of Lent, we have been looking at ways in which the arts express our faith and inspire us with hope.  We’ve heard poems and stories, sung hymns, eaten bread, and moved our bodies in an expression of reverence, and finally in this last week of Lent, we turn to the most classic of arts — painting and sculpture — and since today is the beginning of Holy Week, I’ve decided to focus specifically on how the crucifixion…

Luke 13:10-17 You’ve probably seen a woman like the one in our gospel reading, a woman whose back is so distorted that she is permanently bent in half.  What would it be like, we wondered, to have your eyes always glued to the ground; to see and yet not see, to have functioning eyes that did so little good restricted as they were to the periphery of a permanently downcast sight? Some of us may be coping with a similar…

Matthew 13:1-9, 33 The other day, I was indulging my love of silly sci-fi by watching a show about time travel and in this particular episode, the characters had traveled back to the 1940s where they met the film actress Hedy Lamarr.  Hedy Lamarr was a classic MGM star, known for her stunning good looks and seductive demeanor but in this episode, the time travelers had arrived right before her big break and, as always happens in these stories, the…

John 1:1-11 There’s a lot of competition today between the tech giants Google, Amazon, and Apple as they constantly vie to be the best that technology can offer but I recently saw proof that Apple is closer to perfection than all the rest or at least its assistant Siri is.  You see, Siri is without sin.  Literally.  I know this because when I am walking my dogs, I often use my phone to take notes on my musings for the…

Luke 5:1-11 This is a slightly different sermon than I planned on preaching because as you know, this past week, in an event that is becoming despairingly frequent, a young man walked into a high school in Florida and opened fire, killing 17 people.  When the news broke, our hearts also broke… again as they have so many times over the past few years.  There has been so much killing — sometimes the violence has been racially based as it…

Luke 4:16-30 In today’s passage from Luke, Jesus stands up in worship before his neighbors and friends in his hometown of Nazareth and reads from the scroll of Isaiah. Initially, the people are pleased with him, proud of his scholarship and the eloquence of this man they’ve watched grow up. Moreover, he has declared that God’s favor is about to poured out on the world which sounds pretty good to them. Who among us wouldn’t love to hear that God…

Luke 4:1-15 Winter in western NY can be harsh.  Even in a fairly mild winter, there will be days when the wind scours your skin and the cold burrows into your bones, when you walk with creaks and clackings, a brittle skeleton of living icicles.  When my oldest son John was looking at colleges, he decided to go to Nazareth College in Rochester partly because its system of underground tunnels allows students to walk from their warm bedrooms to their…