Category: Sermons 2026

Matthew 13:31-52 More than two decades ago when I was going through the process of ordination to ministry, our denomination was going through a process of its own. At that time, there was a lot of conflict, competing forces wanting to shape the way the church would look, feel, and move in the world going forward. It was mostly about whether or not the church would fully embrace our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. We were in the thick of this controversy when I went before the presbytery as a candidate for ministry to be examined. In this process, all the ministers of the presbytery were free to ask me any questions they wanted that in any way pertained to my faith. The first person who rose to ask a question wanted to know what I thought about salvation. He began by saying that he knew the idea of universal salvation […]

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Genesis 25:19-34 Matthew 13:1-9 When we were little, my older sister and I convinced our younger sister that her duty as the youngest child was to wait on us; run down to the kitchen and get us a snack if we were hungry, even run down to the 7-Eleven if we had a sudden craving for Doritos or Laffy-Taffy. We had our moments when we were bad, I am ashamed to say. Older siblings often dominate the younger ones because they’re bigger, smarter, stronger – at least for a while.  But sometimes even when things even out; when the younger siblings are as big and strong and smart as the older siblings they still let themselves be dominated, simply because they are used to it.  It’s the way things have always been. If you ever see a younger sibling gain any advantage over the older sibling, it’s probably because they carefully watched […]

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Hebrews 10:23-25 Genesis 22:1-14 There are some stories that you don’t really want to know. Like William Styron’s story, Sophie’s Choice. Sophie was a Polish woman during the Second World War. She was sent to Auschwitz with her young son and daughter. The defining moment in this story is one of Sophie and her children, standing in line with all the other prisoners, waiting to be processed when a German officer approaches her. He offers Sophie a choice: which one of your children should die? Choose or they will both be taken. She chose her daughter. Then there is Toni Morrison’s story, Beloved. The character Sethe is a runaway slave living in Cincinnati with her four children. When the master hunts her down, Sethe grabs her children and runs to the toolshed. She knows she would rather they not live than to see them returned to slavery and so she […]

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Genesis 21:8-21 1 Peter 1:3-9 You might not know much about Hagar, because the story of Genesis doesn’t make her a main character. Although I would argue she ought to be. Hagar is first introduced in Chapter 16 of Genesis. Years have already passed since God first called Abraham on this journey, making promises about descendants that would surpass the number of stars in the sky. Yet even now Sarah remains childless. God occasionally returns to reiterate the promise to Abraham, but nothing happens. And so, not terribly surprising to anyone, Sarah decides to take action. Hagar is a woman who is enslaved to her. She is Egyptian, presumably young and healthy, so Sarah decides she will take a chance on her. In those times, men often took more than one wife – for the sake of being fruitful and multiplying. And a woman who held another woman enslaved, could […]

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Genesis 18:1-15 Romans 5:1-8 Lately I have become aware of one of my personal flaws. I like efficiency, probably a little too much. I like things that are scheduled. Starting things on time. And ending them on time. Although I have to admit that session meetings often run too long. But I try to be on time. As if my life depended on it. As if the schedule were the most critical thing. But this story of Abraham has got me thinking about this, questioning this. Because what is time, really? To our God, what is time? Last week I heard someone say: “We serve a wildly inefficient God.” This is true. Efficiency was not God’s concern in the story of Abraham and Sarah, was it? As we heard last week, God waited until Abraham was 75 years old before calling him out to a new life. And in the […]

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Genesis 1:1-2:4a Matthew28:16-20 Taylor Swift wrote a song called happiness. In it she says, “There will be happiness after you. There was happiness because of you. Both of these things can be true.” So, I am thinking about the sentence, “Both of these things can be true.” Because as confounding as it can be sometimes, it is so often the case in life. Two things that seem to contradict each other can both be true, at the same time. We say that God is three – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we also say that God is one. There is one God – God alone. Both these things are true. We say that Jesus is fully human, just like us. And we also say that Jesus is fully divine. Both these things are true. And in the scriptures, we read that we are made in the image of God […]

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Ephesians 1:15-23 Luke 24:44-53  When we think about where God resides, we have a tendency to think “up.” Humans understand things spatially. We know where things are in relation to other things. So this kind of spatial thinking extends to our thoughts about other-worldly things too. Heaven is up in the sky. Whenever we think of God, or our loved ones in heaven, we want to look up. There is an old movie made in South Africa called The Gods Must Be Crazy. A man named Xi lives in a hunter-gatherer society, far away from the industrialized world we live in. One day an empty glass Coke bottle falls at his feet – a pilot threw it from his plane. Xi has never seen anything like this before. He assumes it is a gift from the gods, because it fell from the sky. So Xi takes it back to his village […]

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1 Peter 3:13-22 John 14:15-21 One Sunday years ago I took a small group of college students to a little Quaker church. Actually, it’s called a meeting house.  This was in Millville, Pennsylvania, the Millville Friends Meeting, which has been there a long time – since 1795.  It is a very small, simple, old building with plain wooden pews.  In the front of the room there’s no pulpit because most Quakers don’t have preachers.  They are known for worshiping in silence and waiting on the Holy Spirit to speak to them. When someone feels inspired by the Spirit to share something, he or she will simply stand up and say what is on their heart and mind. There were a couple of long benches in the front of the room that faced the pews, sort of like a choir loft, I guess.  We were invited to sit there so that […]

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Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16 John 14:1-14 Lyndon Johnson had a long and prolific career in elected politics before he became president. He represented Texas in the House of Representatives for 12 years, then the Senate for another 12 years. Johnson was well-loved in Texas for serving his constituents well, especially in and around Johnson City. Back when I lived in Texas, driving through this area of the Texas Hill Country, I noticed a surprising number of little rest stops along the road. They weren’t fancy like the rest areas we are used to now, with all kinds of amenities for weary and bored travelers. These rest areas consisted of a couple of picnic tables and benches, a trash can. They were well-tended and attractive. And they popped up about every mile or so. One could argue that this was excessive, a profligate number of rest stops. But no one could ever […]

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Acts 2:42-47 John 10:1-10 The book of Acts is really special to me because it is the only book in the Bible that tries to give us a glimpse of just how it all began. It says to the reader, come along with me and I’ll show you what it was like, how this great thing we call the church got started. As I read it, I feel like I can hear the narrator saying, “Man, wasn’t that a time!” Day by day, wonderful things were happening in their midst. This reading from the second chapter is in the very beginning of the beginning. The resurrected Jesus has ascended, the Holy Spirit has descended, and the church is alive. Peter preaches a sermon that everyone understood in their own language – and I take that to mean simply that the Spirit was breaking through all the barriers. People were hearing […]

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