Hello, friends! It’s been a minute. (Many, many, minutes actually.) I have been writing over these past months, but haven’t gotten around to posting. So I decided to post links to the sermons I’ve written since my last post.

Now that we’re (still) in the midst of a world-wide pandemic, I record and post video of me preaching my sermons as well. So when you go to the sermon text, you’ll find a link to the video! (I’m pretending to be excited about the video situation.)

I finished up our series on Acts

• Acts 4-5: “These first Christians had to take the principles Jesus taught them and figure out for themselves what those principles would look like, practically, in community. And they were kind of inconsistent and unclear about how they should function as a church. Which actually feels very familiar and rather comforting.”
• Acts 6:1-7: “Sometimes there’s tension within churches around these mercy and justice ministries. . . . It is so interesting to me that the earliest church apparently struggled with this same tension. They are busy doing their mercy ministry—feeding the widows—when a group comes along and says, wait a minute, what about the justice?”
• Acts 6:8-10, 12, 7:1-2a, 51-60, 8:1a: “We are conditioned to believe that the person who wins must be the person who was right. And martyrdom is a reminder that this is simply not the case.”
• Acts 10:9-23: “Peter’s presence in Joppa reminds us that this is not new behavior on the part of God. The Jewish stories of patriarchs, matriarchs, and prophets are filled with people going places they don’t want to go, connecting with people they would rather avoid.”
• Acts 15: “the Jerusalem Council shows that this work of figuring out faithfulness is best done in community.”
• Acts 16:16-34: There’s no manuscript for this sermon, just the video–filmed in front of the Douglas County jail.
• Acts 26:19-29: “Being faithful often looks crazy. It often doesn’t make sense. It can put us in positions that are dangerous—or just out of step with the people around us.”
• Acts 27: “It’s easy to focus all of our attention on the storm—because it is so immediate and dramatic. But God is still here, too. And we need to pay attention.”
• Acts 28: “the way to be resurrection people is not to deny death’s existence or try to gloss over the world’s problems, but to speak truth about the reality of death AND truth about the more powerful reality of life in, with, and through God.”

And now we are doing the Narrative Lectionary:

• Genesis 2:4-7, 15-17; 3:1-19: “The tree of the knowledge of good and evil tempts us with a lie: that there’s an easy path to wholeness.”
• Genesis 37, 50: “For me, it’s somehow comforting nonetheless. To realize that this time we are living in, even though it seems uniquely awful and terrible and horrific is, in the grand scheme of things, just your run-of-the-mill mess that humans tend to make of this world.”
• Exodus 12:1-13; 13:1-8: “There may be a lot of worldly signs pointing toward continued oppression, toward ongoing suffering. But we know—as God’s people have always known—that our God is a God of justice and joy. We know—as God’s people have always known–that our God has a different future in mind.”
• 1 Samuel 1:9-2:10: There’s no manuscript for this one. Just me talking to my people after a long week of living with the scripture. (And here’s the full worship playlist for those interested.)

---

Thanks for sticking with my on my blog. I’d like to say I’ll post more often, but who knows. Because COVID. And politics. And just life. Please remember that no matter how sporadic my posts, you can always find sermons, reflections, and liturgy links on my Worship Resource Index page.