Text: Luke 1:26-38, Isaiah 11:1-10 This morning, we find ourselves in the second Sunday of Advent… this season of waiting for the coming of Christ. This Christmas story is so familiar and comfortable, we could curl up in it like a blanket. We are ready for the heavenly choirs of angels mingling with the smelly…
Kenotic Words
worship, sermons, lectionary
RESET Purpose
Text: Mark 1:32-39 A few weeks ago, I was leading a meeting with other clergy in our circuit about our shared ministry. We got to the end and before we closed, I asked the question… is there anything we’d like to do differently for our next meeting. One of my colleagues timidly raised their hand.…
Soul Reset
Text: Luke 3:21-23 This July, I walked back into my gym for the first time in more than two years. When everything shut down in March of 2020, I tried to do the online workouts for a bit. When the gym reopened, I wasn’t ready to go back and sweat and breathe with large groups…
Mary the Tower?
Text: Luke 8:1-3, 24:1-11, John 11 As summer draws to a close, we have spent time learning more about some bold characters from our Holy Bible. They weren’t perfect and in many cases there was nothing all that special about them. And yet, they were called to stand up, to lead, and to act in…
The Next Right Thing
Text: Luke 23:50-54 For the last several weeks, we have been exploring some bold and untold stories from the Bible… mostly from the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures. These next two weeks, we’ll look at two lesser known figures from the gospels. We start with a man who shows up in all four gospels. Matthew…
Under the Date Palm
Text: Judges 4-5 One of the things that we discover in many of our Hebrew Scripture readings is a land filled with chaos. The boundaries and borders are constantly changing. City-states and nations were constantly battling one another for land, power, and dominance. Just two weeks ago, we followed the story of the Daughters of…
They Stood Up
Text: Numbers 27:1-11 Friends, can we all admit that this is a very big book and that 99.9% of us don’t know its stories from cover to cover? We understand the overall arc of scripture… from creation, through the time in Egypt, the exodus and claiming of the promised land. We know the big picture…
Taste and See God’s Rescue
Text: Psalm 50:7-15, Proverbs 27:23-27 When we get hamburger patties out of the freezer and throw them on the grill, we do so with very little appreciation for the cow or the farmer that feeds us. We have very little personal connection with the sources of our food when we go to the grocery…