A sermon preached on September 20th, 2020 based upon Matthew 20:1-16, entitled “The Grace Beyond Our Limited Notions of Fairness” A while back a couple of animal behavior psychologists developed an experiment that demonstrated monkeys have an innate sense of what we call “fairness.” Two monkeys were placed side by side in separate cages. With […]
A sermon preached on September 6, 2020 based upon Romans 12:9 – 21 entitled “Getting Clear about Hatred and Evil.” In Paul’s letters, he typically spends the early parts describing the Gospel as he has come to know it – that we are saved by a grace that transforms us and not by works of […]
A sermon preached on August 30th, 2020 based upon Exodus 3:1-15 entitled “The Great I AM”. I want to invite you to go with my in a little flight of fantasy. Let’s imagine that God sends to us our very own guardian angel – think, Clarence from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, just not so clumsy, […]
A sermon preached on August 23rd, 2020 based upon Matthew 16:13-20 entitled “Living the Question.” Several years ago I received an email from a mom from our church that I’ve never forgotten. In it, she described the experience of her young son — an unusually sensitive, open-hearted little boy of about six who had recently […]
A sermon preached on August 16th, 2020 based upon Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28 entitled “Letting Go of the ‘Perfect Jesus’ for the Jesus who Struggles as We Do, Allowing Himself to be Changed in the Crucible of Great Stress.” The sermon followed a children’s sermon on the story of Joseph and his brothers in Genesis. […]
A sermon preached on August 9th, 2020 based upon 1Kings 19:9-13 entitled, “Chaos and Uncertainty: Attending to the God of the Sheer Silence.” Chaos and uncertainty. We sure have been dealing with a lot of it lately, with no end in sight. The pandemic and the uncertainty of what it holds for the future. Protests […]
A sermon preached on August 2, 2020 based upon Matthew 14:13-21 – Pastor Jeff’s first Sunday back after a month of rest and renewal in the midst of the Pandemic, entitled “How I heard this very familiar Jesus story in a new way.” I’ve preached on this story at least forty times and it continues […]
A sermon preached on June 28th, 2020 based upon Matthew 10:40-42, entitled “The Kindness of the Little Ones.” Our reading comes at the end of the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew The entire chapter has been devoted to Jesus’ instructions to his disciples as he sends them out into the world to do […]
A sermon preached on June 14th, 2020 based upon Romans 5:1-5 entitled, “Finding the Hope that Does Not Disappoint.” For the Apostle Paul the figure of Abraham (and presumably his wife Sarah if he could have gotten past his patriarchal bias) was a big deal. The entire chapter leading up to this morning’s reading was […]
A sermon preached on June 7th, 2020 entitled, “Though We Flunked, Nonetheless We Graduated”. This was the Sunday we acknowledged our graduates who have missed out on having a graduation ceremonies, and held a pretend graduation ceremony of our own online. Our Gospel lesson takes us to the very end of Matthew. Once more we […]
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