Sermon Notes (Page 13)

This week we continue our “Questions That Matter” series with a query from Joey, age 8: “How many people wrote the Bible? And why are some stories repeated?” This is a profound question of critical analysis! I sat in classrooms in seminary with graduate students who had never thought to ask questions like this about the Bible. It’s also not that easy to answer, unless we say, “Well, we don’t exactly know!”. What we know today as “The Bible” has gone…

This Sunday we begin our new series on Questions that Matter. If you have yet to hear about this series, we are taking questions from the congregation and other sources about our faith, spirituality, denomination, congregation, and more in an effort to grow in discipleship. This first week, we address a deep question that is rooted in our experience of God. As United Methodists, many of us affirm the Wesleyan Quadrilateral where we approach faith through scripture, tradition, reason, and…

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday and begins our regular season that follows Pentecost. This is the longest season in our Lectionary calendar, lasting all the way until we begin the church year again in Advent! We use the liturgical color green for this season, and one way we might think about this is as a season of growth. Beginning this season of growth, we include one of the most-often-memorized scriptures. Many of us memorized John 3:16 in early Sunday School…

This Sunday is Pentecost Sunday and I’m so excited!! In the Christian tradition (see the Acts text below), we celebrate this as the time when God’s Holy Spirit is given to the disciples who are then empowered to do some incredible things! Of course this is so incredible, it seems, that some of those nearby assume that the disciples have had too much to drink! Peter sets the crowd straight with an empowered homily. But it begs the question: how…

This is our final week for our sermon series following The Lord’s Prayer. This final week, we conclude with a section generally included by most Protestants that is commonly known as a doxology: for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. What does forever mean? Generally, I don’t think we understand the passage of time very well. I read an admittedly dark article online the other day that said in part that we will spend more…

This week, we move to our penultimate service in our sermon series following The Lord’s Prayer, seeking God’s deliverance from all that tempts us. Just as we spoke last week about how we sometimes don’t realize that we are in need of forgiveness, I suggest it may be possible that we don’t realize when we are tempted. I would further suggest that we don’t always know what it is that tempts us. We might think our temptation lies in one…

This week, in continuing our sermon series following The Lord’s Prayer, we examine the concept of forgiveness. It may be worth noting that throughout this series, we’ve chosen to read the Matthew text from a different translation each week. This brings us perspective as we read this prayer throughout the series. I hope that it is also illustrative for us as we remember the many ways Christians from different denominations say this prayer! If you are familiar with other traditions,…

When I was in Boot Camp at MCRD Parris Island, there was a food hoarding problem (in retrospect, I imagine this is a perennial thing). Recruits would squirrel away peanut butter packets or granola bars or apples–really, anything we could get our hands on–because even though we were ostensibly eating 2200 calories a day, we were always hungry. Maybe even more than this, though, when someone else (whom you barely know) is in control of your every moment, it can…

This week we continue our series exploring the importance of the central teaching of The Lord’s Prayer. Told primarily in Matthew 6 and Luke 11 (with a very brief and arguable allusion in Mark 11), this prayer is central to the Christian tradition and is prayed countless times each week. Pastor Lea explored the opening verse last week (find her sermon here), and this week we follow seeking God’s kingdom on earth as it is from heaven. It may be…

This week begins our series on the Lord’s Prayer, also called the “Our Father” or the “Prayer of Jesus”. I began reading Bishop Will Willimon’s book on this prayer this week in preparation for this sermon, and one remark he makes struck me early on: “A Christian is none other than someone who has learned to pray the Lord’s prayer.” While Willimon argues that we should memorize the prayer so as to have access to it when we don’t know…

This is the end of Lent and the beginning of our celebration of resurrection! This is a time of looking forward with renewed hope after a period of darkness. This is a time that surely feels surprising, even to the point that we may even doubt what we see and what we feel. Could it be?? If these words—written to describe the feelings of those early followers more than 2000 years ago—feel familiar to you today, it is no wonder.…

This is the sixth week of the season of Lent and Palm/Passion Sunday. We conclude our Worship series guided by Amy-Jill Levine’s Entering the Passion of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Week. The Scripture passage this Sunday is John 18:1-11. As we near our Easter celebration, we might be tempted to want over to skip over the bad stuff and jump straight to the celebration and the eggs and the fun! And we would be wrong to do this.…