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Sermons

Sunday
21Mar2010

Living in Forgiveness -- Lord's Prayer Series #4

DateSunday, March 21, 2010 at 5:12PM

Matthew 6:7-15; Luke 6:37-42

    As much as we like to say the words “don’t judge,” every one of us has served as judge and jury.  I think it must be human nature!   Maybe it’s the way some person dresses or the car they drive.  Driving a Toyota in Michigan might get you stares, while driving a Prius in Southern California will get you words of praise.   Yes, we love Jesus’s command:  “don’t judge, lest you be judged.”  But, we all find it difficult to remove the log that sits there in our own eyes, even as we try to pick out the speck in the eye of the other. 


    As we come to the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, having prayed that God would hallow God’s name, that God would reveal God’s reign, and having asked that God would provide us our daily bread, we come to the matter of forgiveness.  How should we hear this promise of forgiveness, which seems to be contingent on our willingness to forgive others?       

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Sunday
07Mar2010

Trusting the Day to God -- Lord's Prayer Series 3

DateSunday, March 7, 2010 at 5:35PM

Luke 11:1-4; Luke 12:22-34

We’ve come to the third petition of the Lord’s Prayer.  In the previous two petitions we’ve asked God to make God’s name holy in our lives, and we’ve asked that God’s reign would be made known in our midst, even as we seek to know and do God’s will.  Having made these requests, which focus on God holiness and God’s reign on earth as well as in heaven, we make our first request of God.  And in this request, we focus on our most basic of needs – our daily bread.  Yes, food, water, shelter, these are the basics, and so it’s not surprising that this is where Jesus begins.

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Monday
01Mar2010

Living in the Kingdom -- Lord's Prayer Series 2

DateMonday, March 1, 2010 at 4:13PM

We live in a modern democracy that enshrines the words: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Didn’t the nation’s founders throw off a king in order to gain this independence? And yet, week after week, we pray that God’s kingdom would be revealed and that God’s will would be done, both in heaven and on earth. How do we reconcile our prayers with our politics? I suppose we reconcile these two very different perspectives, by spiritualizing the kingdom of God. We live in a democracy here on earth – where we get to run our own lives – and when we get to heaven, well, then God gets to be in charge!

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Sunday
21Feb2010

Worshiping the Holy God -- Lord's Prayer Series 1

DateSunday, February 21, 2010 at 10:45PM

Isaiah 6:1-8

    Every Sunday we recite the prayer that Jesus is said to have taught his disciples.  It’s a prayer that many of us know by heart.  There is, of course, a debate as to whether this is a model for us to follow or a prayer to be said as is.  There are good arguments on both sides, but my sense is that this really isn’t an either/or situation.  Instead, we will be blessed both by using the prayer as a model and by using it as our own prayer to God. 
    John Calvin suggested that while the form has value, we shouldn’t feel so bound to the form that we’re unable to change a word or syllable.  The point is not the form but the meaning, but still the form has great beauty and meaning.  And so he writes:  

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Sunday
14Feb2010

Were You There? In the Beginning -- A Sermon for Evolution Sunday

DateSunday, February 14, 2010 at 4:19PM

The liturgical calendar may say that today is Transfiguration Sunday, and the social calendar might say that it’s Valentine’s Day, but I have another calendar that says that it’s Evolution Sunday. As you can see from the service, I decided to go with the latter calendar! For the fifth consecutive year churches and synagogues from across the country will be focusing on the relationship between science and our confessions of faith. Evolution Sunday and Weekend is observed on the weekend nearest Charles Darwin’s Birthday. We don’t do this because Darwin was a saint, or because he had special spiritual knowledge that we need to pass on. But, Darwin is important to our conversation, because he personifies the ongoing debate that has rocked our churches and society for decades if not centuries. Although the debate started long before Darwin – just ask Galileo -- the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species changed the conversation between science and theology forever.

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