This Preaching Thing

(A sermon based on Romans 12:1-21 preached on Sunday, August 18, 2014) “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.” And so I thought life was all about getting what I needed with little to no effort being expended by me. A roof was kept over my head, food appeared on my plate, and clothes were placed in my closet. “When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” It’s not like I had much choice. I found that if I was to keep on having a roof over my head, food on my plate, and clothes in my closet, I was going to have to do what adults do: become a grown human being who met my obligations and met my responsibilities. And so with the blessings of family come the responsibilities of family. With the family dinners come the cooking and the cleaning. With making love comes making the bed. With the ball games and the competitions come all of the practices. With the house comes the mortgage. With the fun comes the commitment....

(A sermon based on 1 Peter 4:7-11 preached on August 10, 2014) Most of us are familiar with the term elbow grease; it’s used in a phrase like “That pan was hard to clean—I really had to put some elbow grease into it!” It’s a way of saying that you had to put a lot of effort into a task. My title is a play on that term. There are two ways I’d like you to think about it. First, let the phrase “elbow grace” help you think about the effort that we need to be making as Christians; Christ deserves our all because Christ is our all. Second, let the phrase “elbow grace” help you think about the fact that grace is our “elbow grease”; it is the grace of God that fuels and drives all that we are and all that we do. In the opening words of our passage, Peter tells his readers, “The end of all things is near” (v. 1a). Now, it is likely that Peter anticipated that Jesus would return very soon. We must remember, though, that God’s time is not our time and God’s schedule is not our schedule; Jes...

(A sermon based on John 8:31-36 for July 6, 2014) Two days ago we celebrated Independence Day here in the United States of America. Freedom is a terrible thing. Frankly, it’s easier to live in bondage. Whenever I can I spend some time looking at the newborn babies in the hospital nursery, some of them just a few minutes or hours departed from the womb. Just a little while ago they had been safely confined in their mothers’ belly, warm and snug and peaceful. Now they are stretching their arms and legs out toward the wide and wild world, their bodies twisting this way and that, their mouths at times still and at other times contorted in yawns or cries. They are free. It is God’s way that those little babies don’t know what lies ahead of them—otherwise, they might petition the Almighty for a return to the womb. Now they have to live and in living they will have hard choices to make. And always they will live with the temptation to accept slavery rather than freedom. ...

(A sermon for Trinity Sunday based on 2 Corinthians 13:11-13) The nature of the Church is directly related to the nature of God. As God is characterized by diversity in the context of unity, so is the Church characterized by diversity in the context of unity. As the one God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so the one Church exists as brown and yellow, black and white, male and female, and rich and poor. Granted, the parallels are not exact, but the overall principle is sound: the one God exists in three persons, the one Church exists in millions of people. That which binds us together—namely, the love that is God and that comes from God—is greater than that which threatens to separate us. The church at Corinth struggled mightily with the unity thing; indeed, Paul spends much time and expends much effort in his letters to them trying to help them get over their fractiousness and their factionalism. He has to say some tough things to them as he tries to help them deal with t...

(A sermon based on Colossians 3:12-17 for Pentecost Sunday 2014) We’re encouraging ourselves to dress casually for worship during these hot summer months, which is fine and reasonable. After all, it’s possible to dress casually and still dress nicely and appropriately. I still remember what it was like to get dressed for church at our house when I was a boy. My parents both worked in textile mills and so there was a definite difference between their work clothes and their church clothes. It was 1968 or 1969 and I was ten or eleven when we got our first air conditioner, a big window unit the acquisition of which required the rewiring of our house, and I can still see my father standing in front of it on those hot summer Sundays, putting his dress shirt on over his undershirt just before going back to the bedroom to ask Mama to powder his nose. Hey, he was a Sunday School teacher, after all; he couldn’t have the light reflecting off his nose obscure the Light of the World! Last ...

(A sermon based on Colossians 3:5-11 for the Seventh Sunday of Easter 2014) Among the many things in the Hebrew Bible that fascinate me there is this one: toward the end of the book of Joshua, in which we read about the conquest of the Promised Land by the Hebrews, we find this line: “A long time afterward, when the LORD had given rest to Israel from all their enemies all around, and Joshua was old and well advanced in years …” (Joshua 23:1); then, in the very first verse of the very next book, the book of Judges, we read this: “After the death of Joshua, the Israelites inquired of the LORD: ‘Who shall go up first for us against the Canaanites, to fight against them?” (Judges 1:1). So in one place we read that the Hebrews had been “given rest … from all their enemies” and in the other place we read that they needed someone to lead them in battle against their enemies. Which was it? Well, it was both. The Lord had brought them out of their grave of imprisonment in Egypt and had gi...

(A sermon based on Colossians 1:15-20 for the 2nd Sunday of Easter 2014) Last October, Amanda Fiegl of National Geographic asked National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) meteorologist Stephen Corfidi why some sunsets are so spectacularly colorful . Here is his explanation: When a beam of sunlight strikes a molecule in the atmosphere, what's called "scattering" occurs, sending some of the light's wavelengths off in different directions. This happens millions of times before that beam gets to your eyeball at sunset. The two main molecules in air, oxygen and nitrogen, are very small compared to the wavelengths of the incoming sunlight—about a thousand times smaller. That means that they preferentially scatter the shortest wavelengths, which are the blues and purples. Basically, that's why the daytime sky is blue. The daytime sky would actually look purple to humans were it not for the fact that the sensitivity of our eyes peaks in the middle [gre...