How do we reconcile the freedom of other people to live their own lives with Jesus' instruction to spread the gospel? We know that some people make no restrictions – they stand on street corners and hand out gospel tracts, they go door to door just as Jesus said to do, or they use every opportunity in conversation to talk about their faith and what God has done for them. I don't know if you've ever asked yourself this question, but I invite you to consider it now: What would you do to share the Gospel with someone else? Read this sermon...(Microsoft Word Format)

This “faith versus works” dilemma is nothing new. It's been debated for centuries now, with both sides pointing to Jesus and Paul as proof that one interpretation is better than the other. Perhaps the answer to this complicated problem is really rather simple: we don't need one or the other to be followers of Christ, we need both. Maybe the seemingly complicated issue of salvation is really a wonderful mathematics of faith, where it is understood that faith + works = salvation. After all, will we really do good works without faith first in the presence of God, and can we claim to have faith if we refuse to take action, even eating with sinners? Read this sermon...(Microsoft Word Format)

Economies may ebb and flow, sunshine may give way to great torrents of rain, but the take home message today is that the work we put into our faith is what determines our success in any place and time. Hearing God's word is but the first step, living is the lion's share of the task and the journey. It's typical for us to look at buying a house as equity – saving for the future, for retirement, for a rainy day. If we're willing to put that much effort into our financial security how much more should we give for our spiritual bank account? Read this sermon...(Microsoft Word Format)

I'm fond of saying that, despite thousands of years of history, the world of the ancient Israelites and the world of today are not all that different. I think the parallels are pretty apparent: the Middle East of the past was war-torn over the resources found there, in those days of course water, farmland, minerals, and wood were the precious commodities that every army was willing to march for. The effects of warfare on the masses – the farmers, the peasants, the shepherds – were unimportant to the leaders of the time; they thought strictly in terms of benefits and plunder. It was considered a grander thing to occupy and strip a country of all its resources, a divine call that would glorify and sanctify the king. Read this sermon...(Microsoft Word Format)

Peter says that both men and women will prophesy through the spirit. Contrary to popular belief, to prophesy is not the same as fortune telling. A prophet is not one he tells you next week's winning lotto number, although if anyone here has that ability please see me after the service. No, a prophet is the one hears the voice of God, and speaks to the people, and also listen to the people and brings their voices to God. In the Old Testament, many people conceived of a prophet as the one who stood on the city wall, turning back and forth from the people and God to help them communicate with each other. Read this sermon...(Microsoft Word Format)

How important it is that God gives us both perspectives: unity and diversity, humility and blessedness. To try to be only one is to limit ourselves and our faith. I watched with dismay, recently, a film made by Ben Stein called “Expelled,” in which he tried to prove that evolution is a myth. There seems to be this idea among some Christians that evolution is an enemy of faith. But must it be so? Could not our God, who carves the paths of rain and makes suns rise and wind blow also have crafted a world over millions of years? Beyond evolution we must face the larger truth that science is necessary to our lives and a great blessing to humanity. Read this sermon...(Microsoft Word Format)

Some people spend years of their lives trying to find the people who gave birth to them. We are all born with a memory full of echoes of the past, before we can into being. I’m not referring to past lives, but that innate sense that we came from somewhere – out of the void, crafted from some hands, not merely the products of random genetic activity. Jeremiah speaks of God being known to God even before he was born, his existence then crafted in the womb of his mother. In the Jewish tradition they speak of the “Chamber of Guf” – the Hall of Souls where every person who will ever exist waits to be born. In a sense we may feel like children of our Creator, and reflect on some distant place from whence we may have been given our form. Read this sermon...(Microsoft Word Format)

“The church can be a womb, or a tomb,” an old piece of wisdom suggests. Today we hear of faith being put to use in both ways. The temple of men is contrasted with the universe God has made as a temple for all. Jesus is likened to a stone, the cornerstone that supports a foundation, while stones are used to end the life of a good man seeking to enlighten others. We’re told of a church that pleases God and nurtures human beings and a church that tries to keep God away from the world and those not judged worthy enough to receive him. And finally, we read of a priesthood that hordes the power of the Holy Spirit and forms an elite class, and a royal priesthood made up of every soul that worships in spirit and truth. Read this sermon...(Microsoft Word Format)

We may think that God is strangely silent in our lives, but I became a believer because I learned that God has much to say if only we know how to listen with the right ears. To look with the right eyes. To understand that God may not always speak in human words, but that God is always present and visible when we stop to pay attention to the brilliant creativity around us, and within us. Our God is present in all things, and we can say confidently therefore that God is loving, kind, merciful and infinite. Read this sermon...(Microsoft Word Format)

Thomas was one of the first to bring the Gospel to a place where it had never been heard. The challenges that waited for Thomas in India were formidable indeed; not only was it a very distant and foreign land, but the Hindus present there had no common ground for understanding the very basic ideas of Christianity. The Christian faith is monotheistic – one God, which Thomas had to explain to a people used to millions of deities. The idea that everyone was equally loved by that God – a radical idea in a nation that believed everyone was born in a certain class and must stay there. Read this sermon (Microsoft Word Format)

We may not all travel far in our lives, but we are all pilgrims, we are all seekers. The wonder of Easter and the resurrection of Christ reminds us that none of our journeys will end the way we might expect, and none of our conclusions are forgone. We rejoice in the idea of new life because it reminds us that not only is God always leading us somewhere new, but that at the very end of this journey the road will turn sharply, and there will be no end. Read this sermon (Microsoft Word Format)

Preaching on death is not an easy thing to do, and listening to a sermon on death is probably not particularly easy either. Yet we look at Jesus’ final days on earth and cannot help but see the truth that Jesus teaches us. We too must all face a dark garden when we battle our deepest fears. The fact that we’re Easter people certainly emboldens us, we know the joy of death conquered by love. The road from here to there, however, always takes us through dark Gethsemane. Life always pauses on the doorstep and beckons us to weep, to pray, and to surrender before we go. Read this sermon (Microsoft Word Format)

We need a theology of weeping. Some of us have come from the stiff-upper lip school. Be tough, be stoical. We males sometimes grow up with the motto: Don’t be a “cry baby.” But we have to unlearn that kind of conditioning, if we want to avoid becoming hardened and repressed, going around protecting ourselves against feelings. Jesus, whom we follow, was not that kind of man. He was fully human. He opened his heart to people. He opened his heart to love, and that means he was open to pain. Suffering is always part of love. But the suffering, the grieving, the weeping means we are awake and alive. Tears flow when we drop our pretensions, when we start to live out of our deepest longings and hopes. Tears can be a gift. Read this sermon (Microsoft Word Format)

How do we live without light, in blindness, then? Paul says, become light yourself. The first step is accepting what you don’t know, and what you will never know. That’s the crucial point that the Pharisees missed, learning to be comfortable with saying “I don’t know.” “I can’t see.” We can easily miss it too, especially in a world that insists that everything is knowable and understandable given time. Our society applauds those who have all the answers and indeed, a wealth of information is available to us at any time. Got a question – just Google it. Can we be comfortable accepting mystery and darkness, I wonder? Read this sermon (Microsoft Word Format)

Take a moment to think about your life. Where are the places and the people in world that we try to avoid, even if it means going the long way. Every town has the “bad side of the tracks” or the slum no one wants to pass through. Every community has people - the drug addicts, the mentally ill, the working poor, those who make us uncomfortable because they think or look or believe differently than we do. There’s so much bad news in the world today, sometimes we don’t want to hear the cries of those suffering under the cruel reign of injustice. Are they welcome in our neighborhood? We must reach out to our brothers and sisters, to the people we don’t even know and who we haven’t tried to know. Read this sermon (Microsoft Word Format)