Sermon Archive

Text: Psalm 150 Get on a bus, or subway and I can almost guarantee that someone, somewhere in that car is wearing a pair of white headphones. (They look something like this)…They’re usually attached to an iPod... For those of you don’t know what an iPod is, it is a small piece of technology that can fits in your pocket that one can play music on. While that’s not particularly revolutionary, it’s the simple volume of stuff these tiny little things can hold. The latest version of the iPod can hold 15,000 songs, 25,000 photographs or 150 hours worth of video. If you think of it this way, it can hold as many songs as normally would be found on more than one-thousand compact discs, or roughly 800 pounds of vinyl records! It weighs just a couple of ounces, and can have one’s entire music library on it. Theoretically you could hit “play” have it run twenty four hours a day, and not have it repeat a single song for more than forty days! Music has become very easy to share and to play these day...

Easter Sunday 2006 Text: Mark 16:1-8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. It’s not supposed to end like that!! What do you mean that they went out and fled from the tomb and said nothing to anyone? It is an ending that we hardly expect, especially since we have been building towards this for so long. Easter morning is finally here, we come out with our trumpets, our voices, expecting a big angel chorus, shining lights, fireworks and spectacle… and all we get is that those who went to the tomb ran away in fear. It’s as if the story simply stops mid-sentence. What a letdown! After all, this is Easter Sunday! Early in the morning Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome go out to the tomb where Jesus was laid to rest. They brought herbs and spices with them so that they could anoint his body as was the funeral customs. The Sabbath was over, and so now this task that normally wo...

Psalm 22 Mark 15:21-41 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me??” What does it feel like to be abandoned? This day is for all of us who know the desperation and despair of being totally alone. It has been said that one of the first major crises for a child is separation from their parents. The time when a baby cries out, and their parents either do not hear, or do not come. Somehow as we grow older, we encounter this same crises over and over again in different forms. Psychologists and psychiatrists spend a great deal of their time analyzing human anxiety, and separation and abandonment is perhaps one of the greatest ones to touch the human soul. Yet separation is more than just a sense of anxiety, it is a genuine theological crisis that every single one of us faces. At some point in our lives, each one of us will feel as if we are abandoned, whether it is by a friend, our family, society, or even God. It is a theological crisis, because we struggle with what it means. Our sense of a...

Text: Mark 14:1-15:47 It is an extraordinarily long read… at least in comparison to what we’re used to on any given Sunday. Initially, I had tried to cut down the reading from Mark’s gospel to something a bit more manageable, something that wouldn’t cut into my sermon time… but then again, maybe that is the point. So often, we tend to slice up our readings, that we don’t get the whole story. With it being Holy Week, the whole story is far more important the individual slices. It begins today, as we recall the great triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. The common people are waving Palm branches, throwing their cloaks down in front of this teacher from the north. Whispers of the Messiah has come to them… an heir to the throne of David, and the people have been waiting so long for this. They have struggled under the weight of Roman occupation for years… and before that Greek kings, and before that the Babylonians… and before that… well, it has gone on for far too long… The expectatio...