I have to be quite honest. There is really nothing about this parable from Matthew that I like and is one of the reasons that I struggle with the Gospel of Matthew. “The weeping and gnashing of teeth” is one of my least favorite scriptural phrases and appears in Matthew a total of six times. […]
You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me Exodus 20:5 I am not sure if I ever came into contact with the 10 Commandments […]
The Parable of the Good Samaritan. I suspect that everyone here this morning has heard this parable before, or at the very least heard the phrase “Good Samaritan.” It is a well-loved and well-worn story. Robbers rob and gravely injure a traveler, most likely a Jewish man as Jesus does not tell us his ethnicity, […]
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life.” John 1:1-4 Last week I challenged […]
Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. John 3:17 To read the headlines about climate change would be to see the crisis in which we are currently living solely as a crisis of science and technology. Fix […]
Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, which falls on August 6th every year, though we usually only celebrate it if it falls on a Sunday, as it has this year. It isn’t the only day in the year that we hear the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, however. We also hear this story every year […]
“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” Mustard […]
A friend and I were talking about this summer’s weather recently, and she decided that the summer should be called 2023: the summer nothing would dry. But I had another title, 2023: the summer of the weed. I don’t know what your yard looks like, but I fear that by fall the weeds will have […]
I’m not one to give my sermons titles, but if I were to give this sermon a title it would be either, “Wounded People Wound People,” or “Heal Yourself and You Heal the World.” To me these are the same titles you could give to most of the Book of Genesis, particularly when we get […]
Abraham is the father of three major religions. We know him as the faithful man who answered God’s call at the age of 75 to leave his native land and to travel with his wife to an unknown land. We know him as the man who had a son when he was well past the […]