The best recipes tell a story. This one starts with my friend, Sid Davis, who is the Minister of Music at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Houston. He called awhile back and invited me to come to his church to do two things. One was to read a poem for All Saints Sunday (that…
all saints we move too quickly to divide the world that’s a complete sentence but it’s not the whole story we move too quickly to divide the world into saints and sinners as though life is a contest that demands winners and losers so that some…
More Sundays than not, I choose one of the passages from the Revised Common Lectionary for my sermon text. I also do it a couple of weeks ahead of time to help our part-time office administrator use his time efficiently, so the verses had been chosen a good bit before it came time to prepare…
The first Sunday in October is World Communion Sunday for the denominations that observe it, which carries its own irony, I suppose. Any reason to celebrate more people at the table is good news to me. This year, the first Sunday in October also marked the date of my official installation as the Minister of…
The parable at the heart of my sermon this week is one that has been read a number of different ways. Here’s how it hit me this week. ______________________________ Many years ago, I was on a Southwest flight from Dallas to Houston. It was back before the TSA required us to run a gauntlet of…
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…