How to Spot a Fake (Sermon 9-26-10)

1 John 2:1-14 (New International Version)

            Some of my favorite memories in life are from family vacations I took as a child. We didn’t take many, but the ones we did take were great. Big family trips down to Florida, weekend trips to, for my family anyway, the eternal city of baseball, St. Louis. Those were our usual destinations. But, there was one summer when we switched things up a bit and instead of heading to the south or the west, we headed northeast. My Dad’s best friend from High-School was living in Pennsylvania at the time, so my parents decided that we’d spend a few days with his family, then check out all the great places out there we’d never been to out there, like Gettysburg, Washington D.C., and New York City.

            Now, Gettysburg and Washington D.C. are great places to visit, but at the moment they don’t provide me with the sermon illustration I’m wanting to use today, so we won’t be talking about them much. As I said, we hadn’t visited a lot of cities, the largest place I’d been to before then was Chicago. And as large as Chicago is, it has nothing on the sheer immensity of New York City.

Walking in the Light (Sermon 9-19-10)

               Starting this week, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to change tracks slightly, or get on a specific track. The first four weeks that I was with you all, I preached using the lectionary. The lectionary is a great tool for preaching, especially during the holidays. It provides a nice set of Scriptures, all pre-selected for you, and thus removes a large chunk of the “work” when it comes to preaching. However, the difficulty with using the lectionary during what we call “ordinary time” is that it often makes the preaching appear disjointed, you hop around from topic to topic with, at times, no apparent rhyme or reason.

Sin and the Believer (Sermon for 9-12-2010)

Romans 6:12-23 (New International Version)

SIN AND THE BELIEVER

Opening thoughts

            Over the past four weeks, what I’ve found to be one of the most difficult aspects of this job is the slow process of adapting to it. Like everyone else, whenever I start a new job it takes me a few weeks to acclimate; I need to get to know the people I’m working with and be in the work environment on a regular basis for a while before I feel comfortable. When I started preaching at Gibault it was a little bit of an easier transition. I’d been there for two years by the time I took over and I was a regular part of the kid’s lives for at least five days a week.

Really, God? Sermon for 9-5-10

Psalm 1
1 Blessed is the man 
       who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked         or stand in the way of sinners         or sit in the seat of mockers.
 2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD, 
       and on his law he meditates day and night.
 3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water, 
       which yields its fruit in season         and whose leaf does not wither.         Whatever he does prospers.
 4 Not so the wicked! 
       They are like chaff         that the wind blows away.
 5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, 
       nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
 6 For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous, 
       but the way of the wicked will perish.

As you already know, the Psalms are the “Prayer-book of the Bible,” or we might call it the “Hymnbook.” Either way, though it may sound strange, it is one of the most “human-esque” books in the Scriptures; it’s filled with dialogue between God and Man. This makes it an interesting book for theological study.

The Wedding Feast

This post is from last Sunday's sermon. No reason for the delay other than being otherwise busy. Sorry.
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Luke 14

Healing of a Man on the Sabbath

 ¹One Sabbath,^(A) when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were^(B)watching him carefully. ²And behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy. ³And Jesus responded to^(C) the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, ^(D) "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?" ⁴But they remained silent. Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. ⁵And he said to them, ^(E) "Which of you, having a son^[a] or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?" ^6(F) And they could not reply to these things.

The Parable of the Wedding Feast

 ⁷Now he told a parable to those who were invited, when he noticed^(G) how they chose the places of honor, saying to them, ⁸"When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, ⁹and he who invited you both will come and say to you, 'Give your place to this person,' and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. ¹⁰But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place,^(H)so that when your host comes he may say to you, 'Friend, move up higher.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you. ¹¹For^(I) everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

The Parable of the Great Banquet

 ¹²He said also to the man who had invited him, "When you give^(J) a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers^[b] or your relatives or rich neighbors,^(K) lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. ¹³But when you give a feast,^(L) invite^(M) the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, ¹⁴and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid^(N) at^(O) the resurrection of the just."

        Up until recently, I unfairly thought this passage to be one of the most “yawn-inducing” passages in the entire New Testament. “It’s not so bad as the genealogies, but only a step above really,” I thought. It comes at such a strange place in the story, too. In the previous chapter, Jesus tells one of the fig tree parables, basically saying “hey guys, I’m holding off God’s wrath for now so that you might bear fruit.” He heals a woman on the Sabbath, then tells the famous parables of the mustard seed and the leaven, the parable of the narrow gate and the door being shut, and it all wraps up with some Pharisees telling Jesus that Herod is out to kill Him, to which Jesus responds that He can only be killed in Jerusalem and tells of it’s coming destruction.

            All of this is major, heavy, plot-building stuff. And then, in the midst of all of it, Jesus decides to sit down and play Emily Post for a little while. Boring. I mean, who wants to hear about table manners at a first-century wedding feast when the Kingdom of God is at hand? Jesus has just given Jerusalem, from a distance, the “I didn’t want it to end this way” old-school “your number’s up” speech; and then segues into telling us about how to not embarrass ourselves at a party?