Sermons

Who was healed? It is the question I find myself coming back to over and over as I read our story from the Acts of the Apostles this morning. Admittedly, at first this sounds like a somewhat stupid question, one easily answered with another question, “Who was raised from the dead?” But the longer one […]

We often think of Jesus’ beatitudes with a warm and glowing feeling, but when you really sit with them, they are troubling. They make us uncomfortable. They can even be hard to wrap our imaginations around. After all, we like the idea of being comforted and fed, especially when we are hungry and weeping, but

As I reflect on my life, I realize that my own understanding of who Jesus is has changed many times. When I was a child, he was the subject of many stories that I was told in Sunday school and in church. I believed that he was God because that’s what people, that’s what adults,

Jeff and John were an older couple when I knew them. They had married a few years before, when same-sex marriage had been legalized, but they had been together for many decades. They were faithful members of the congregation, rarely missing a Sunday and their gregarious and extroverted personalities meant that they could always be

I have a fragment of a memory from when I was a young child. I don’t know how old I was, but I was not yet tall enough to see over the top of the counters in our kitchen. My mother was in the kitchen, cooking, and I was reaching my hands up over the

But the thing David had done was evil in the Lord’s sight. Just two weeks ago, I was preaching about the promise and blessing that God sees us—all of us, all our brokenness and woundedness, and seeing us completely, God has compassion for us. And there is a wonderful good news to that reality—that we

God had warned them. The people longed for a king. They desired to be like the other nations, with a ruler that would fight their battles for them, with a figurehead that would represent their aspirations and glory. Then they would be respected. Then they would fit in on the world stage. But God was

I wonder how Jesus knew? As he stood aside from the other disciples with Peter, how did he know it was Satan speaking in the words of his disciple and friend? Where had he heard these words before so as to recognize them so quickly? It is a startling story we hear today, because his

When I was in seminary, I knew a dear little church community, St. Chad’s, Loves Park. It was located about two hours outside of Chicago, a small, struggling congregation in a small, struggling, rust belt town. But they dreamt big dreams and they had big hearts to match and they approached their work and ministry

When you are young, some things seem to stretch on forever—the last hour of the school day before the bell rings, the wait for the sun to rise on Christmas morning, or the length of a summer day. For me, it was riding in the car, whether my parents were out running errands or we