Sermons

We just moved passed the halfway point in the season of Lent. We have plumbed the depth of our need for help and worked to get rid of barriers to the coming of our Savior. Now we get to see the coming light of the resurrection, the primary event in our salvation.

In the Gospel of John, we are in a kind of transition as well. Chapter 11 of John marks the end of Jesus’ public ministry. Next, we move into Jesus’ final trip to Jerusalem where he enters the city in triumph and is cast out in the most shameful and painful death the Romans could devise.

Jesus’ raising of Lazarus from the dead seems, to modern and rational folks like us, something that is hard to get our heads around. People don’t come back from death, do they? And if they do, why didn’t my daughter, mother, father, grandparents, beloved friends come back to me from their deaths? Read more…

More than that the Pharisees had become aware that Jesus’ disciples were also baptizing, perhaps in greater number than had John the Baptizer. Jesus decides that it is a good time to leave Judea and head back to Galilee.

There was more one way back to Galilee, but the shortest way was through Samaria, lying between Judea and Galilee. However, Samaria was populated by a Jewish sect, known as Samaritans, with whom non-Samaritan Jews had significant differences. Not all Samaritans could trace their roots back to Abraham, as could non-Samaritan Jews. Also, Samaritans believed that the appropriate place of worship was not the Jerusalem Temple but in a different location, at Mt. Gerizim. The Jews had destroyed the Samaritan shrine there about 130 years before Jesus was born. Read more…

I am not good at picking out titles for my sermons. Mostly I just take a line from one of the morning’s scriptures as my title. I did not do that this morning. I was not trying to be flippant, but I did want to provoke you to think about sin, especially during this season of Lent.

A lot of people think that the Scriptures are about sin and only about sin and sometimes only about one sort of sin. Some people would have us focus on violence and war as the primary sin about which we should be concerned. There are people very concerned about sexual sins, perhaps mostly about same sex relationships which they regard as sinful. I disagree, but there are such people. There are people who want to talk about economic sins, where powerful rich people keep others poor and powerless.

Well, the Bible talks about sin. Jesus talks about sin. I am going to jump ahead in my sermon for just a second to say that I am one of those folks who thinks the Bible is basically about one sin, a sin that can show up in a variety of ways, a variety of sins. Please listen as I try to make the case for that argument. Read more…

One of the Old Testament readings in the lectionary for this Sunday, Transfiguration Sunday, comes from Exodus. It is the story of Moses going up the mountain to encounter God in the burning bush after which he came down with the Ten Commandments. Read more…

There are three words in Jesus’ sermon on which I want us to focus: salt, light, and you. Notice the simplicity … each a word with which everybody is familiar … each a single syllable. No chance of confusion … Jesus is going to basics.

Take those three words one at a time. Salt. Salt.

Everybody knows what salt is. It is the white, grainy stuff that we put on our food to make it taste good. These days we are told to use salt in moderation. We need to avoid having high blood pressure so be careful how much salt we use.

But salt is what gives foods the taste we seek. Jesus referred to salt that has lost its taste. Such spoiled salt is only good for throwing out the kitchen door. How does salt lose its taste? It can absorb moisture from the air or from steam coming off something else we are cooking. Watered down salt is worthless. Read more…

The experiences we’ve had in our lives certainly affect our understanding of the words we read in Scripture, don’t they?  I think that many people must brace themselves when they read or hear the words of Jesus, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Many of us have heard preachers in their sermons tie in their call for us to repent with graphic denunciations of all that we might have done wrong to demonstrate our need to repent.  Then those same preachers follow up with threats of hellfire and brimstone if we don’t repent.  So, a first reading of Jesus’ words this morning might evoke for many of us very uncomfortable feelings associated with wrong-doing and with fears of punishment.

Based on our culture and our experience Jesus’ words “the kingdom of heaven has come near” may also suggest punishment.  The use of the words “kingdom of heaven” was and is a way that Jews can reverently refer to You-Know-Who without saying the name that is too holy to say directly.  Read more…

This morning, we focus on Jesus’ baptism.  Many of you know that I was raised in a Baptist church.  Baptists will cite these verses from Matthew as proof that Jesus was baptized by full immersion in the waters of the Jordan River, and that therefore we should all be baptized by full immersion.  The basis here for this belief is the line from Matthew that Jesus “came up from the water.”  When I was baptized by full immersion, my arms were crossed over my chest, and I was lowered backwards into the water and then lifted back up to the standing position by the arms of the preacher.  Baptists would argue that Jesus was similarly raised back up by John, hence, as the scripture says, he came up from the water.

The Baptists may be right.  However, we cannot be sure.  Jesus’ coming up from the water is also consistent with Jesus having waded into the Jordan up to his knees, with John having baptized him by pouring water over his head, and with Jesus then returning to the bank of the river.  Jesus’ coming up from the water may simply have meant that he waded out of the river onto its bank.  We don’t know.  Hence in the UCC we don’t prescribe the volume of water to be used in baptism. Pastors are free to sprinkle, pour, or immerse. Read more…

What an odd time of the year this is! We have concluded the season of Advent, the first Sunday of which is the New Year’s Day, the first day, of the Christian liturgical calendar. And we are now only a very few days away from New Year’s Day, the first day of the secular calendar.

It is a kind of in-between time. The excitement of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day has largely come and gone even though we continue in a residual kind of Christmassy spirit. We look ahead eagerly to the excitement of that one last tick of the clock in 2025 and the first tick of the clock in 2026.

I find that this in-between time is a good time for thinking more deeply about my life, about my family, and about our culture and our times. I think of it as a kind of “time-out” when our schedules slow down and the slower pace makes room for deeper thoughts about who we are and who we might want to be.

The Jewish people to whom Third Isaiah prophesied were in a kind of in-between time. The first returning exiles had left Babylon after six decades of captivity in Babylon, and later exiles would have spent even more time in that alien land. They were returning to a city that had been smashed, literally, with very little, if any, of the city’s buildings still standing. Read more…

Some sermons are easier to write than others.  Sometimes it is hard to know what to say … the topic is difficult … the Scriptures are complicated, and they may be confusing.  This sermon was a little harder to prepare however because there is so much to say about joy … the joy of following Jesus the Christ … the joy of serving the will of God in mission and ministry … the joy of knowing that there is a providential plan for the future of all of Creation.   Joy is so much more than the mere emotion of happiness, and it is very hard to communicate the fullness and richness of the joy of serving our Savior. Read more…

Paul tells the Philippians in verse 4 of Chapter 4 to “Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I will say, Rejoice.”

Thank is an amazing thing for Paul to write. Paul was in prison, probably in Rome, facing a capital charge that would soon cause his execution. What on earth could Paul have had to be joyful about? And why was he telling this congregation to rejoice?

Two thoughts as I try to answer those questions. The first is that the word joy and its cognates (joyful, rejoice, etc.) appears second in number in the Bible only to love. A key characteristic of Christian living should be joy. The angels announced the birth of Jesus at Luke 2:10 by saying to the shepherds, “Do not be afraid, for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people …”

Jesus undertook his ministry for the joy of it says Hebrews 12:1-2 “… let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us,  looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” Read more…

What are the most common words in the Bible?  Okay, so take out the a, the an, the the … focus on the words used by the Bible to tell us how to behave or how our faith might make us feel or what the Bible says about how we are supposed to be with one another.

If you guessed love, you are right … 842 times the word love or loved or loving shows up. What comes in second place? Joy … some version of joy, enjoy, joyful, rejoice … shows up 694 times.

Don’t quote me as an expert who is being exact on those numbers … that was what a quick look-up showed. The point is that the word “joy” shows up a lot in the Bible, maybe second only to “love.”

I chose the words of the thirtieth Psalm for our Call to Worship this morning because it lifts up the joy that comes to relieve us in our distress. “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Read more…

Well, there is not one of us who is not a sinner. We experience grace and forgiveness because our Savior Jesus the Christ took our sins with him to the cross and made atonement for us there.

So, what is all this stuff about All Saints Day … why are we talking about saints? Brother Alan, sinner that you are, I thought only Catholics, and the Orthodox Church talked about saints. Read more…

Sometimes a preacher just does not quite know what to say from the pulpit. This is one of those times.

I would love to spend my time today sharing stories about the good times my wife and I had visiting friends in Maine over the last couple of weeks. Or I could tell you about my attempt to eat as many oysters, mussels, lobsters, and fresh-caught Gulf of Maine fish as I could. Yum!

Unfortunately, there has been a very large cloud hanging over our good times that makes it difficult to celebrate. During the past couple of months, the people of the United States have suffered through an onslaught of violence that is impossible to ignore. And that explains why I stole a line from Jeremiah for the title of this sermon. He grieved the sinfulness of ancient Judah and the coming destruction by invading Babylonian armies. I have been almost immobilized by sadness and grief over recent violent developments in no particular order … Read more…

Our two Scripture readings today do not seem to have much in common. A very young Jeremiah is called by God to be God’s prophets. Jesus reaches out to a woman and heals her.

Let me offer a couple of similarities. First, they were initiated by God. Jeremiah did not, as far as we know, seek out God and ask God to make him a prophet. Indeed, Jeremiah seems, as have many called to mission and ministry by God, protested that there were good reasons why God should not do what God intended. In Jeremiah’s case, he protested that he was too young.

It didn’t work of course … never does … God is not interested in our excuses, especially if we protest our weaknesses. Why? Because God’s strength is more than enough to compensate for any weaknesses or problems that we see with God’s plan.

God put God’s words in Jeremiah’s mouth. And God’s word was powerful. God told Jeremiah:

“Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”

God’s words must be really powerful! And it was God who initiated the encounter with Jeremiah.

Read more…

Faith or faithfulness is not a simple subject. In the Old Testament references to faith or faithfulness often refer to the faithfulness, the khesed or steadfast love, exhibited by God to his Creation and to his people. Later references in the Scriptures refer to our faith, our faith in that selfsame God as most fully revealed in the person of Jesus, whom we honor as the Christ.

The unknown author of the book of Hebrews says that “…faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Or, as the novelist Madeleine L’Engle put it, “Some things have to be believed to be seen.”

That is completely out of step with modernity. We believe what we see, hear, taste, touch, smell … we need physical confirmation to believe. A prime example of that attitude is Marxist Socialism, where all is material … history is determined entirely by material forces … there is no Christian or Jewish God or indeed, there are no gods whatsoever. Faith is immaterial and therefore does not exist. In my view it is impossible for someone who espouses the Marxist ideology of materialism and atheism to be a faithful follower of our God. Read more…

There are a lot of people who don’t know about the Lord’s Prayer and the people who do know about the Lord’s Prayer have a lot of questions about it.  For example, why do we pray a formal memorized prayer in the first place. It is not entirely clear that Jesus was giving the disciple a set prayer that the disciples and followers of Jesus were to use, word for word.  He might simply have been giving them an example of how to pray, using simple and direct language, in contrast to flowery and complicated language used in prayers in formal Temple worship or in prayers by people who wanted to impress everyone with their religiousness and brilliant theology.  Jesus may have been saying, “keep it simple” rather than prescribing a particular prayer.  The Mormons do not use the Lord’s Prayer in worship because they interpret Jesus’ words in this way. Read more…

The title of this sermon is a question, Who Is My Neighbor?  However, that is not the only question that arises in the story featuring the Good Samaritan.

First, where were the police?  Where was the protection for the traveler?  Modern day police forces are, well, a modern-day invention … starting, I think, in London in the 1800s. Various piecemeal solutions were adopted in towns and cities throughout history.  However, in Jesus’ time travel between towns and cities fell between the cracks. There was likely to be no one in charge of public safety on the roads and highways. Protection for travelers came from traveling in groups.  The larger the group, the greater the safety in fending off individual bandits or gangs of bandits.

A second question … what did the lawyer mean when he asked Jesus about inheriting eternal life? I grew up, as have many of us, thinking of eternal life as sitting around on clouds, playing harps, and getting comfortable with our new wings.  The prospect of such a life, going on forever, was enough to cause Mark Twain to say he preferred going to hell.

We tend to think of “eternal” as lasting forever, something with no beginning or end. Not having reached this eternity, I cannot speak with authority on the subject. However, suppose we think of eternity not only in a temporal or timeless sense but also as a quality of life with God. Participating in God’s love and grace could be a timeless moment, a moment that could well feel like the eternal. I believe that such moments may be accessible to us in the here and now through prayer, Bible study, worship, music, and through appreciation of the variegated beauties of God’s Creation. Read more…

Sometime in reading Scripture, I am struck by the number of times certain words are repeated.  In our readings this morning, the words “joy” and “rejoice” appear seven times, four in the Old Testament and three in the New Testament.

They appear because both readings are describing, in one form or another, communities that point to the coming Kingdom of God. Isaiah is encouraging the former exiles who have returned to Jerusalem. He promises a community where illness and poverty and hunger shall disappear.  That is the Kingdom of God. That is a beloved and joyful community, and the people should rejoice at its coming. It may not have arrived in full yet, but we can rejoice in the existing community of returned exiles as a promise of what will be. Read more…

Our Scripture lessons are all about focus.  Elisha knew he would really have to focus in order to keep to the prophetic standards set by his predecessor, Elijah. So, he went back home, and here I am reading between the lines, and said good-bye to his parents.  He also killed his oxen and burned his farming equipment to cook them and gave the meat to the people.

Elisha got rid of all ties holding him to family and farm and hometown.  He was thereby free to follow Elijah and to do whatever Yahweh required of him … without distraction.

Elijah was unhappy about this of course.  He wanted Elisha to just walk away right on the spot, forgetting about any responsibilities to parents or farm. Read more…

The American landing on the moon happened on July 20, 1969 (Sunday).  Mankind’s first step was taken on the moon on July 21 (Monday)

Sometime after that, I was in church on a Wednesday evening at prayer meeting.  That was an occasion for testimony and for prayer.  One of the church’s deacons stood up and announced that it was ridiculous to think that human beings had landed on the moon.  The reason, he said, was that you could hold up your thumb and the end of your thumb would completely blot out the entire moon.  How, he asked, could human beings land and stand on something that small?

I was in my early twenties, plenty old enough to recognize that what the deacon has said was just crazy.  He clearly had no idea of perspective, the notion that a small object could blot out the view of a larger object if the larger object was sufficiently distant … something one could learn quickly in a lot of ways but especially if you have ever tried to draw a scene with some objects nearby and larger objects far away. Read more…

Some years ago, I remember reading a newspaper article which reported that nearly half of American women fear that they will end up as a bag lady.  According to this newspaper article, ninety percent of women feel financially insecure and nearly half of all women, 46 percent, suffer from what the reporter termed “Bag Lady Syndrome.”  Women might earn good salaries, have money in their purses, might have stashed away decent amounts in savings and investments.  Doesn’t matter — they are still afraid that they will wind up broke, forgotten and destitute, as bag ladies.  Rich, famous, does not matter.  All admit to fear of becoming a bag lady.  Read more…

On previous occasions I have talked about hitting speed bumps when we read the scriptures.  Speed bumps are words or phrases or sentences that cause us to slow down if not come to a complete halt in our reading because they provoke us to stop and think more deeply about what we are reading.  Well, today’s reading in the Gospel according to John has one of those speed bumps.  Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

The odd word, the speed bump, is the word “new.”  What is “new” about the commandment to love one another?  In Leviticus 19:18, we are told to “love your neighbor as yourself.”  That commandment is at the heart of Torah and is quoted and referenced on numerous occasions in the New Testament by Jesus and by Paul and James (Mt 5:43, Mt 19:19, 22:39, Mr 12:31, Lu 10:27, Ro 13:9, Ga 5:14, Jas 2:8). Read more…

One would think that after thousands of years of study and debate and discussion, there would not be anything more to say or discover about the Bible.  WRONG!

I am a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, a worldwide organization of people who study and teach and preach from the Bible. As part of that membership, every week I receive by e-mail a set of reviews of new and recent books published by Biblical scholars from all over the world.  Recently I received a notice about a book entitled Sound Mapping the New Testament.  The description of the book says that modern understanding of the Biblical texts comes from translations based on silently reading to ourselves the written words.  But in ancient times, in the Hellenistic world, writings were read aloud, heard, and remembered. That difference between ancient and modern approaches to literature, argue the authors, obscures the beauty and meaning in writings such as the New Testament. Read more…

Sometimes it is the oddest things that get my attention on the Internet.  From an Internet listing of now extinct breeds of dog, I learned that apparently there was a breed in England in the 1800s called the Turnspit Dog.

The Turnspit Dog was a short-legged, long-bodied dog bred to run on a wheel, called a turnspit or dog wheel, to turn meat so that it would cook evenly over the kitchen fire.  That must have been a dreadfully boring job!

The dogs were also taken to church to serve as foot warmers. During a worship service at a church in Bath, the Bishop of Gloucester gave a sermon and uttered the line “It was then that Ezekiel saw the wheel.” At the mention of the word “wheel” every foot-warming turnspit dog raised up and ran for freedom! Read more…

I want to speak with you about the subject of change.  God told the Jewish people in exile in Babylon that things were going to change … I am about to do a new thing, God said through Isaiah. Jesus’ feet were anointed with costly perfume, something that was very unusual … kings and dead people might be anointed for different reasons, but no one anointed the feet, especially with an ointment so expensive.

The Jewish people could not imagine what God was about to do, lead them out of exile back to their homeland … unimaginable! And none of those at dinner with Jesus could figure out what the heck that woman was doing or why she was doing it … it just did not fit with what they regarded as usual and customary behavior. Read more…