Sermon Archives

Lent
February 14, 2016

Surviving the Desert

If you search the Internet for “desert survival stories,” you’ll find lots of heart-warming stories about people who get rescued from danger in the desert. For example, the story of a woman named Victoria Grover appears on many websites. In 2012 Victoria, then 59 years old, was hiking in the high desert of Utah. Her […]

April 5, 2015

Meditation for Easter

There’s a detail about this story that always intrigues me. It’s this: Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus the first time she sees him. This is interesting because she had spent lots of time with him during his ministry. She knew the way his eyes twinkled when he told stories. She was familiar with the way his […]

March 29, 2015

Learning from the Death of Jesus

In this series on death and dying, we’ve thought theologically about funerals, explored the pathway of grief, heard stories of loss and thought about responding to loss, and last Sunday, named some ways to prepare for our own dying. One important topic still remains for us, and that’s to think a little today about how […]

March 22, 2015

Getting Ready to Die

I once knew a man who did not die well. This man had a terminal illness, but instead of admitting to himself and others that he was going to die, he acted like he was going to live for decades to come. For example, he left the apartment he had been renting and went out […]

March 15, 2015

Responding to Loss

It is hard to know what to do with loss, whether the loss is our own, or someone else’s. We can feel overwhelmed by loss, and overwhelmed by the cumulative effect of loss. We can respond to loss in a variety of ways; we can become bitter about how life has treated us, or entrenched […]

March 1, 2015

Grieving Well

On November 11, 1971, my grandmother was killed in a traffic accident. At dusk that evening, she was driving a tractor with a wagon attached behind the tractor. A drunken man, traveling about 60 miles an hour in a zone marked for 40 miles an hour, crashed his car into the back of her wagon. […]

February 22, 2015

The Ritual of Remembering: Funerals and Memorial Services

Today we begin the season of Lent, and we also begin a worship series on the rituals of loss and remembrance; a series on death and dying. You might be asking: Why a death and dying series for Lent? There are a number of reasons we are doing this. One reason for this series is […]

April 13, 2014

The Arrest

Most of us have kissed—or been kissed—at one time or another. When our sons were small, I probably I kissed each of them at least a thousand times, plus however many times Jenny kissed them. We don’t kiss our sons anymore—a fact for which they are profoundly grateful—although Jenny and I still kiss each other […]

March 30, 2014

God-Smacked

During my first year at Chicago Theological Seminary, I lived in one of the seminary’s dormitories. One afternoon at 5:00 I left my dorm room and walked down to the dormitory kitchen, located in the basement. This kitchen served all the students who lived in that dorm. We each had our own cupboard and cooked […]

March 23, 2014

Boundaries, Buckets and Blessings

The Jews and Samaritans had been estranged for a long time. It all started when those who had been in exile and those who had not been in exile, couldn’t agree on where the temple should be. Initially, it was a mild estrangement, but around 200 BCE, it grew in intensity. It ended with the […]

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