Sermons by Rev. Jason S. Glombicki (Page 64)

In school, there was one subject I never enjoyed. I saw the importance of science, math, and, of course, religion, but I hated grammar. What put me over the edge was dissecting sentences. It was complicated with its many lines – horizontal, vertical, and dotted. I was already struggling with parts of speech, and dissecting sentences crossed the line into my firm hatred with grammar. Yet, it turns out that the parts of speech matter. Who would have thought?! To understand the full impact of today’s gospel, we must understand verbs and nouns to best grasp the word “believe.”…

One of the first functions I learned when using a computer was the infamous restart using “Control-Alt-Delete.” Whenever things weren’t going right, “Control-Alt-Delete.” When the computer froze and wouldn’t work, “Control-Alt-Delete.” And when I’d call for help the IT person often would say, “did you try restarting it with… Control-Alt-Delete?”…

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book entitled “The Tipping Point,” he challenges the reader to make a list of the people whose death would truly leave them devastated. Let’s try it – count the number of people. Gladwell says that twelve people is the average. Those people you listed make up what psychologists call our “sympathy group.” A sympathy group is that circle of people with whom we can closely connect. Often this group includes one’s extended family or ethnicity, and they become the in-group; everyone else in the world, by default, become the out-group.[1] What do we do with this biological tendency to make in-groups and out-groups? …