Sermon Archives

Racism
June 7, 2020

We Can’t Breathe

We can’t breathe. I realize the strangeness of me saying that. In our current context, many of us are free from the worry of having someone’s knee crushing our neck, of being shot in our own home, or having the police called on us for something as simple as birdwatching. In that sense, many of […]

May 5, 2019

The Converting Community

Restrictions for the Gorham Subdivision; Goshen, Indiana; Recorded October 24, 1946 at ten o’clock AM. The following restrictions are incorporated into the Plat and are to be recorded as an integral part thereof, and the said plat is subject thereto.  All lots in the tracts shall be known and described as residential lots. . . […]

February 4, 2018

Come and See

A few weeks ago, after work I took a look at my news feed on my phone. I find that over the past year I do so with a great amount of fear and trepidation.  I was amazed that a certain crude, descriptive word, not censored, no stars or symbols where certain letters should be, […]

September 3, 2017

Picking up the Cross: A Christian Response to Charlottesville

Several weeks ago I received an email inviting my participation in a counter-protest happening in Charlottesville, Virginia. People from a non-Mennonite faith community I was a part of in D.C. invited people of faith to a non-violent collective action to protest Neo-Nazis, alt-right supporters, and White nationalists gathering to respond to the city’s intent to […]

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,” […]

August 7, 2016

Resisting Racism

When I was 12 years old, my parents adopted another child. One morning in May 1971, I went to school without a brother; that same day when I came home from school, there he was, my new brother, who had been born in the Goshen hospital just 3 days before. Matthew is biracial: his biological […]