If I were to catalog all my sermons, I imagine I would find I mostly preach from the Gospels. I am fascinated by the words and actions of Jesus. I also love the stories. The letters grew out of specific situations in churches across the Mediterranean world, but most of those stories sit in the…
I love reading things for the second or third time for several reasons, one of which is that I see new things. The words on the page don’t change, but I do, in both big and small ways. I was reminded of that this week as I read, for the more than third time, Jesus…
This week’s passage was the story of Moses and the burning bush, which set me thinking about the little fires that ought to catch our attention. ______________________ Reading the account of Moses’ life as it is told in the first three chapters of the Book of Exodus reminded me of a Peanuts cartoon where Linus…
As I started to post my sermon from this past Sunday, I realized I had not yet posted the one from the week before. The passage is from Matthew 16—a conversation between Jesus and his followers about who they thought he was, which was a fair question, and one we still wrestle with. _____________________ When…
I concluded my series on the Lord’s Prayer this past Sunday with a look at why we repeat ourselves in worship. We have more than one reason, I suppose, but the ongoing challenge is to maintain our intentionality: to repeat as a matter of meaning and not a matter of convenience. ________________________ During the first…
Though the final phrase of the Lord’s Prayer isn’t in the oldest manuscripts, and when it is the words only show up in Matthew’s version, it has been part of the prayer that gets repeated so often for centuries, even millennia, which makes it worth considering. Here’s the sermon from this week. _________________________________ We have…
almosts it doesn’t have to be a sudden death shoot out for the little things to matter horse shoe nails go missing long before kingdoms start falling we miss most of the might have beens and play on unaware of all the almosts that roll by disguised as incidentals to see them all might be…
We are down to the next to last phrase of the Lord’s Prayer, which is the one about temptation and evil, so easy stuff to describe. Here’s what I had to say. _____________________ When you watch a series on television, whether on a network or one of the streaming services, the episode often begins with…
On the way to church Sunday I listened to Don Henley singing “Heart of the Matter” because I was preaching on forgiveness—the line in the Lord’s Prayer about sins or debts or trespasses. I ended up adding the lyrics to the end of my sermon. I also listened to the Lyle Lovett song I had…
We made it to the daily bread this week in my series on the Lord’s Prayer. To aid our thinking, we read the story of the manna God provided for the Hebrew people (Exodus 16:9-21) and the Feeding of the Five Thousand (Luke 9:10-17). In putting the sermon together, my mental travels took me to…