Sermons & Worship (Page 42)

Joshua 1:1-9 In November of 2016, hours after the Chicago Cubs broke a 108 year old curse to win the World Series, the cemeteries of Chicago sprouted Cubs’ hats and flags draped across the tombstones of loved ones. Sharon Sokas said that she had put a Cubs’ flag on her husband Michael’s grave because she watched the entire series with her husband constantly in her mind. “He would have been ecstatic,” Sokas said as she stood at her husband’s grave.…

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…

Genesis 4:1-16 [Introduction to story.  I refer to these stories in the early chapters of Genesis as teaching stories, stories that are not meant to be historically true but that are told to teach us important lessons about the nature of our lives, the nature of God and our relationship to God.  We can see right in the Bible itself the evidence that the story wasn’t meant to be history since the story of Cain and Abel ends with Cain…

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…