I’ve always liked playing Trivial Pursuit. The questions were always so difficult, but I like that the game aims to help you be well-rounded in your knowledge. The goal is to get every single different piece of the pie filled in… only then do you win the game. Maybe that’s because I’ve always been somewhat of…
Kenotic Words
worship, sermons, lectionary
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In today’s parable, Jesus is in the middle of teaching his disciples one last time. He is only days away from his crucifixion in Jerusalem, days away from leaving them, days away from his death. Jesus wants to make sure they are prepared for life after he is gone. He is asking these people to…
Build the Church Again
It is the last Sunday of the fair. The final Sunday of the Olympics. The last Sunday before the school year starts for our children. And the final Sunday of our Summer of the Prophets. It might be hard to believe it, but this summer we’ve covered about 400 years of biblical history. We’ve…
The Beloved Community
Today, we enter the world of Micah… a prophet from the late 8th century… just over 700 years before Christ. And to put ourselves in Micah’s shoes, I want you to imagine with me for a moment a world that is under great stress. Imagine pressure coming from an aggressive empire or state that believes…
Lamentations and Investments
I must confess it was difficult to pick just one passage from Jeremiah and in the light of the events of this week, I wasn’t sure that I picked the right one. I wondered if I should have chosen from Jeremiah 8 and 9: Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?…
Light of the World
The prophet Isaiah is a difficult person to pinpoint. Unlike some of the other prophets we have covered so far, where we understood who they were and when they were speaking, there has been great debate about whether the entire “Book of Isaiah” was in fact written by one person. Whether the book is all…
God’s Love Never Fails
This is our fourth week with the prophets of the Old Testament, and one of the things I hope you realize is that they weren’t all the same. Every single one of them were called by God to share the word in radically different ways. Elijah was called to do battle with other prophets. Elisha…
I am NOT a prophet
In 1908, a mining disaster in Monogah, West Virginia claimed the lives of 361 men. 250 of those men were fathers and nearly one thousand children in the area were suddenly fatherless. And along comes Grace Golden Clayton, a Methodist, who had recently lost her own father. She felt a call to do something, to…