Sermons

Pentecost XIV: God calls us to judge and heal our nation of the ongoing sin of racism, but we can only do that as we judge and heal ourselves.

Pentecost XIV: The transformation was palpable and powerful, so much so that I had to struggle to hold back my own tears by what I was seeing of God’s great love that surpasses all of our understanding.

Pentecost XIII: Taken as a whole, reading the Bible is like attending a really dysfunctional Thanksgiving dinner, one where the kids at that separate table are fighting over more than who gets the cranberry sauce.

Pentecost XIII: The flame of love Jesus bears for God consumes every unnecessary thing while carefully preserving the essential.

Pentecost XII: Christians don’t live in a fantasy. We live in ultimate reality.

Pentecost X: Learning to read a rock—a piece of God’s creation—is very much like the life of prayer itself. … Prayer is about accommodating ourselves to what God is doing in and through us and the world.

For the majority of people … a low-grade faith life with periodic worship, haphazard spiritual practices, and a relationship with God that asked little of them was just fine.

Pentecost IX: Jesus spoke five times more about economic and money issues than he did about prayer, harkening back to Deuteronomy and particularly the fifteenth chapter where we are commanded to do something about the poor and the needy.

Pentecost VIII: It’s always, always a test in those moves to see whether those new neighbors will welcome.

Pentecost VII: To surrender does not mean to give up. Surrender, at its root, means to give back.