Sermon Archives

Lent
March 11, 2018

Wild Courage

Today we are in the wilderness with the people who’ve been liberated! With those who have been FREED … With those whom God has FED everyday for forty years, With those who have been trusting the CLOUD of Presence to be out ahead and lead into the PROMISE. We are here with these who’ve stayed […]

March 4, 2018

Getting Angry with Jesus

I both love and hate being angry. Since the election of our 45th president, I find I spend a disproportionate amount of my time outraged. Since the Me Too movement, I also find I spend a lot of my time outraged. And for every mass shooting that comes into our consciousness every few months or […]

February 25, 2018

Wild Dignity

This week our community made the national news. Floods, water in our houses and businesses… Mess… Distress…for ourselves and our neighbors. We look for a caring community…people who will lift sandbags and help us deal with the muddy situations in life. This week meals have been shared and visits have been made, and we celebrate […]

February 18, 2018

Being Alone with the Alone

Most of us go into the wilderness at some point in our lives, but there are at least two kinds of wilderness experiences. The first kind of wilderness experience is the one most of us do not want. We get divorced, and the divorce is difficult. Our best friend dies, and we mourn for several […]

April 9, 2017

Where Was God?

We whites would like to forget about it. We would like to pretend it never happened. Nevertheless, one of the terrible truths about American history is that from approximately 1880 through 1960, white Americans lynched around 5,000 blacks in this country.[1] Most of the lynched people were men, but about 2% were women.[2] Usually lynching […]

April 2, 2017

Breathe the Breath

In the United States at the present time, fear of the other is perhaps more powerful than it’s been in recent memory. We hear people demean others who look different, act different, or think different. National rhetoric urges us to be afraid of “radical Islamic terrorism,” or to be suspicious about “enemies of the people,” […]

March 26, 2017

We See

It’s bad enough being a kid and having your mother give you a spit bath, but to be an adult, and have some complete stranger wipe their spit on your face, well, that’s just going a bit too far! And it wasn’t just spit, but spit mixed with dirt to make mud! What was Jesus […]

March 19, 2017

We Thirst

I was tempted to re-use the sermon I preached here 3 years ago, because it still seemed to be so relevant to what is going on in the world. In that sermon, I talked about how Jesus crossed many boundaries and borders in his interaction with the Samaritan woman. We live, still, in a world […]

March 12, 2017

Looking to Jesus

Once in a while, you will hear people say that the Bible doesn’t deal with politics. The Bible only deals with spiritual things, they claim, and has nothing to say about economics, race relations, refugees, and especially politics. For these people, the Bible only addresses spiritual issues. The Bible isn’t political. But we who read […]

March 5, 2017

Hope for the Struggle

Over the last four months I’ve participated in a number of conversations with other Mennonites about the new reality here in the United States. In these conversations people name at least three aspects of our new reality, which I list here in no particular order. The reigning political climate openly vilifies immigrants and refugees, some […]

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