Sermon Archive

Text: 2 Samuel 11:1-15 If last week we discovered that not much in politics and power has changed over three thousand years... this week is another lesson... Guaranteed to hit harder than anything we’ve had before. This is the story of David and Bathsheba... It is not a poignant love story... It is not a gentle tale about a noble king and a fair maid. This is a story of corruption, adultery, treachery, murder, cover-up, and out and out robbery. It is one of those stories that most of us don’t believe could possibly come out of the Bible, and yet here it is... laid out before us, demanding our attention. What do we do with such a story? Do we ignore it? Do we pretend it isn’t there? Hardly. Stories like this demand our attention, and are perhaps more important than any platitude we pick up in the Bible. Sex, power, and politics... This is real life. This is gritty. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God! The story starts out imaginatively enough, and is penned with the skill of ...

Text: 2 Samuel 7:1-17 People in power often say things they wish they never had. Foot-in-mouth disease is a professional hazard in politics. Regardless of your political stripe, it seems like every political leader makes a verbal mistake, or ends up doing something they shouldn’t have. Backpeddling is an art form, it seems, although most politicians are not very good at it. It becomes even worse when they are working with the advice of a trusted advisor, They are the “spin doctor” who works in the background to prevent such incidents… rather than actually cause them. As we have learned over the years, politics is well, politics, and is complete with unique pitfalls. With a position of authority comes the responsibility of power and its best and most effective use. It is more than simply the people in power, but also the people that advise… As we learn today, there is nothing new in politics. What I have been talking about could be any number of incidents in our own governments in recen...

Text: Mark 4:35-41 I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for the way the disciples are pictured in the gospel of Mark. These are the people whom tradition says would play a major role in the founding of the Christian Faith. Even so, have you noticed that the disciples never seem to get the point? In Mark, they come across as a bunch of lunkheads would couldn’t find a clue if it came up and bit them. Throughout the gospel stories, we find the disciples never quite getting the point, always being a bit slow on the uptake. It’s a miracle in and of itself that Jesus actually put up with them. Yet it is a little too easy to simply dismiss the disciples this way. I can’t help but wonder if the disciples always got the point, Mark would have nothing to write about? For us as listeners of the story, the dullness of the disciples is an aid and a guide. Their dim-witted responses help us learn more about Jesus, and more about the good news that Mark proclaims. Most importantly, it helps us learn som...

Text: 1 Samuel 17:1-11; 19-23; 32-49 Every once in a while, the suggested weekly readings from scripture, stumble across one of the great old favorites. Those stories that many of us learned in Sunday School way back when, and have continued to be the staple of the tales that we tell children that bring home memories of our own childhood. David and Goliath, amongst all the others, stands tall amongst this dearly beloved collection. Regardless of how historical the events are in First Samuel, the story of the young boy and the Philistine Giant has taken on an epic, mythic quality. They are part of the cultural collective, even in our now mostly secular society. Most people can at least associate the metaphor “David and Goliath” as the classic underdog story… even if they don’t realize it comes from the Bible. A lot of the time today, we hear it used in business and economics, where a small business entrepreneur takes on the great mega corporation. As I have mentioned before with familia...

Text: 1 Samuel 15:34-35 – 16:13 The sign outside says “Facing Goliath.” While that may be somewhat true, Goliath doesn’t really show up until next week. We are much more familiar with the story of David and Goliath than we are about the lead-up to this well known confrontation. Yet Samuel’s anointing of David is a great story about unexpected grace… about how God sees us, and how we are often too hasty to jump to our own conclusions and keep our own ideas than we are to listen to what God is calling us to. As familiar as we might think the early stories of David might be, it’s worth it to go back and listen to them again… and maybe find something unexpected. At the opening of the story, we find Samuel grieving over the now-wounded relationship between himself and King Saul. He had warned the Elders of Israel years ago that having a king would have its price… and now those prophetic words had come home to roost. At God’s reluctant direction, Samuel had anointed Saul as King… yet as powe...

Text: Jonah (Chs. 1-2 read in worship) I have a confession to make. I decided to preach Jonah after hearing the choir’s anthem. Today’s the Sunday School picnic, and really a time to celebrate and have a bit of fun. The choir captured it beautifully, and the last thing we needed was a long dull treatise on the doctrine of the Trinity. So instead of using the usual Trinity Sunday readings, I changed one of them… to Jonah… There are some benefits of being part of a “free church” tradition, we can change things if we need to! The story of Jonah is the best-known short book in the entire Bible. While it’s not the shortest, one can easily miss it flipping through the pages of Hebrew Scripture. It is only four chapters long for a total of 48 verses, and 1,343 words. By that count it’s certainly shorter than most sermons! I’ll have to remember that… You can find it between page # and page # in your pew Bibles, but as you may have noticed this morning it can pass by pretty quickly. Yet the sto...

For Ascension Sunday 2006 Text: Ephesians: 1:15-23 This past week, all the theatrical film buzz has been about the DaVinci Code, the movie based on Dan Brown’s best-selling novel. In spite of being slaughtered by the critics, and slammed by church officials, the domestic box office for the film was $77.8 Million, and a record-breaking $153 million in the foreign-opening market… It perhaps proves the point that any publicity is good publicity. The fastest way to get anyone to see something or read something is for a representative of an old staid institution to tell you to not go and see it! Go figure. So I went out and saw it this week… call it sermon research… honest! One film critic wrote that the movie tries too hard to take the novel as a serious theological treatise, rather than the pulpy airport mystery novel that it is. I tend to agree… Maybe that’s where we need to leave it… a fanciful work of fiction… but at the same time, it has people talking. I didn’t hate the film… found i...