Sermons on Hebrews

Sermons on Hebrews

The Urgencies That Deserve to Claim You

Mark 13:1-8 and Hebrews 10:11-25 On Wednesday mornings, I get together with the Worship Connection group to delve into and discuss the scripture readings for the upcoming Sunday. It’s an opportunity to dig deeper into the passages and to engage in dialogue about what we read. An opportunity that a sermon alone doesn’t always provide. We try to remember the importance of not only being attentive to what is going on in the story—the actions and reactions of the characters…

What’s in Front, What’s Behind

Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12 We have already made our silent, personal prayers of confession before God this morning. But I have a public confession to make. I’m not a big fan of preaching on the Epistle to the Hebrews. It’s not the easiest reading book of the New Testament, which doesn’t exactly make it “preach well.” Hebrews relies on obscure Biblical characters like Melchizedek and high-churchy words like Sanctification to gets its message across. So, the challenge of making that message…

Double Negative

    Hebrews 13: 1-3, 5-8, 15-16           Every week, a printed manuscript of the sermon I preached on Sunday, gets emailed to the forty or so people on our Sermons to Go email list. A copy is also printed on our church website, where perhaps more people read them. I wonder how many of those readers wonder if I flunked English in school? When I write a sermon my go-to mode of expression is not precise grammatical correctness so much as…

The Flutist (SUMMER SERIES)

Isaiah 5:1-7 and Hebrews 11:29 – 12:2 Near the beginning of the Boynton Canyon Trail—before the desert terrain gives way to the forest of the upper canyon—stand a pair of rock formations named Kachina Woman and Warrior Man. It is said that together they represent natural manifestations of male and female divine energies. But the most memorable experience of the place might not be the sights or the sensations, but the sounds. Because it is there that you are likely…

Montezuma’s Well (SUMMER SERIES)

Hebrews 11:1-3, 1-16 More than a thousand years ago, before any European settlers had migrated to the North American continent, a people known as the Sinagua made their way up from what is now Mexico into the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. The Spanish translation of the name Sinagua means “without water.” Something they were not destined to be for very long. As they crossed the dry grasslands of Arizona they stumbled upon a lush oasis, concealed within the depths of…

Provoking One Another

Preached FCCW November 18, 2018 Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25   When you open up the Bible, what do you expect to find? Stories that teach us about what God is like? Moral lessons to guide us? Personal comfort for difficult times? Inspiration? All of that is there in the Bible. But, when you open your Bible to the passage we just read from the Epistle to the Hebrews, what you read there is something you might not expect to find.

The War to End All Wars

Preached FCCW, November 11, 2018 (Veterans Day Sunday) Isaiah 2:1-4 Hebrews 9:24-28   This morning we will mark Veterans Day by joining with houses of worship in many other communities by our participation in the Bells for Peace event. Bells for Peace is a commemoration of the armistice that was signed 100 years ago this day, to bring the First World War to its conclusion. World War I was billed as the War to End All Wars. As we all…

First Hand Faith

Preached FCCW, October 28, 2018 Job 42:1-6, 10-17 and Hebrews 7:23-28      A new bride was preparing a ham dinner for her parents and in-laws, when her husband noticed that his wife cut off two apparently good ends of the ham before it went into the oven. When he asked her why she did that, she thought about it for a moment, and then said, “That’s the way my mother always fixed a ham.” After dinner he asked his…