Sermon Archives

June 18, 2017

Practicing God’s Presence at the Table

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. And you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Perhaps it is fitting, that in the midst of this series on hospitality, and on the Sunday in which we say […]

June 11, 2017

The Berkey Table: Who is Missing, Unseen and Invisible?

This is a sermon in 3 parts. Lament We don’t always offer the welcome we want to. For various reasons, there are people and situations that we don’t see or respond to: maybe we don’t know how to respond, maybe we unintentionally avoid people or situations, maybe our mostly homogeneous appearance is the closed door. […]

May 14, 2017

The Table of Hospitality

The idea for this series grew out of conversations at Worship Commission about how we get to know each other. We reflected that we are good at welcoming people when they come through our doors, and start to attend regularly. But once people have been with us a while, we wondered how do we get […]

May 7, 2017

The Fountain of Hospitality

Four weeks ago today, on April 9, United Airlines in Chicago removed a doctor, David Dao, from a plane by forcibly dragging him out of his seat. Other passengers filmed the incident on their smart phones and uploaded the video to social media. On the video you can hear the doctor screaming that he doesn’t […]

April 30, 2017

Bearing One Another’s Burdens

(Skit, “To Tell The Truth”, done before sermon.) In a light-hearted way, this skit gives you a glimpse into Stephen Ministry, and the differences between Stephen Ministry and psychotherapy or theological education. The motivation for this ministry, as well as the training received in order to do it, grow out of love and the desire […]

April 16, 2017

Remembering . . . and Encountering

About 25 years ago, my mother died. Her death affected me so much that for several months afterward, I was disoriented. I had trouble mentally focusing on things and spent more time than usual staring out the window, daydreaming, thinking about her, trying to imagine what life would be like without her. I also had […]

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 […]

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