Category: Sermons
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On Knowing What Good Is
Substance of a sermon based on Isaiah 55, preached at a small church in Southern Indiana on the Third Sunday in Lent, 2022 At first, this beautiful passage from the book of Isaiah might seem out of place in the very middle, the third Sunday in Lent. It’s awfully happy, for Lent. Yes, there are […]
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Getting into Lent
A sermon more or less from worship at a little Southern Indiana church this past Sunday, on Luke 4:1-13. Lent can sneak up on us … it was just Christmas, and then already the VFW is making Mardi Gras food and Jay C has paczkis in the bakery section, and here we are reading about […]
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A Thought on What It Means to Serve God Day and Night in God’s Temple
At the beginning of the COVID crisis, our church shifted to meeting online, like lots of other churches. But knowing that some members of the congregation would miss out on that, because of their “tech” capabilities or comfort, we – technically, our pastor, but with the enthusiastic concurrence of the Session – started mailing out […]
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[Re-]Making History
A sermon on 2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33, delivered at the Corydon Presbyterian Church on Sunday, August 8: This scripture reading picks up the story of king David at least eleven years after the events we read about last week; a lot has happened during that time; it’s a plot worthy of a Netflix original […]
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Experiencing Grace
Grace is all around us, all the time; we could experience it more often, if we got in the habit of noticing that. A sermon – text Luke 17:11-19 – from the Corydon Presbyterian Church yesterday. Luke’s story of Jesus healing 10 lepers is probably well known to us from stewardship seasons past. Because […]
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Courage, and Jubilation
A sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter: The scriptures during Easter mostly focus on messages of Christ’s triumphant new life and victory over death. So it might surprise us that the Fourth Sunday of Easter, every year, the Sunday that is called Jubilate Sunday – Jubilation Sunday, “shout for joy” Sunday – has also […]
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Continuities
Our wonderful pastor was called away, along with her family, to celebrate the life and mourn the death of a dear family member. Hence this sermon, based on Acts 4:32-35: We don’t actually know a lot about the earliest church, the earliest Christians. Yes, there are whole large sections in libraries about life in the […]
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Preaching for People You Can’t See – or, a Message in a Bottle
Our wonderful pastor was taking a well-deserved vacation on Sunday, and the Worship Committee had not heard back from the other person they asked about preaching for the First Sunday after Christmas, and they knew I needed a link to a sermon I could share with the Committee on Preparation for Ministry anyway, which I […]
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Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
[A sermon delivered at the Corydon Presbyterian Church on Sunday, August 11, 2019.] A lot of times these Bible stories we read in church start sort of the in the middle of things, and we need some backstory … but we can read the book of Ruth as a whole self-contained little story, really, and […]
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Third Sunday in Lent
[“The Humble Questioner,” a sermon for First Unitarian Church, Louisville, Sunday, March 24.] I come from a tradition in which it’s customary to prepare a sermon as a reflection on a text – so here’s one text – it’s a little proverb, actually, that according to tradition was collected by one of the wisest people […]
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First Sunday in Advent
[A sermon, “Something to Know By Heart,” delivered this morning at a small church in southern Indiana; the main text is Deuteronomy 6:1-9; also refers to Luke 21:34-36] Today, as we know, is the First Sunday in Advent. Here is what the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship says about the season of Advent: ‘Advent’ means […]
Matters of Interpretation 