Sermons from March 2021

Sermons from March 2021

If Stones Could Shout

If Stones Could Shout Luke 19:28-40 Palm Sunday is one of those Holy Days where worship tends to find its most memorable expression not so much in the liturgy of the day, but in the optimistic atmosphere of the moment. In other years than this, it meant children, herded by their church school leaders, streaming along the sanctuary aisles, clutching armfuls of palm fronds to share with the congregation. It is the Church’s version of a Super Bowl victory parade…

Before And After

Before and After Ephesians 2:1-10 Few things manage to pull off being brutally honest and powerfully motivational at the same time, the way before and after pictures can. Which is something the advertising industry has recognized for a long time. Nothing sells gym memberships faster than pictures of love handles spilling over the waistband of a bikini, split screened to a shot of the same person with tight abs and slender hips frolicking on a beach before an audience of…

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…

Fool’s Gold

1 Corinthians 1:18-25 Christians who believe in and try to live by the gospel are considered by many people to be gullible or naive. Like kids who never outgrew their belief in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. I remember the day when I told my former employer that I would be leaving my job to finish my seminary education on a full-time schedule and then pursue a call to ministry. “You’ll never make any money doing that”, he told…