Sermons (Page 153)
Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Suppose you’re looking to buy shoes, where might you go to find them? Maybe a shoe store, a department store, or online. If you need a high quality recipe, what would you do? You could talk to a friend, go to a cookbook, or go online. Now, if you want to figure out if that weird skin thing is something to worry about or not, where would you turn? Maybe you’d turn to a doctor, a friend, or… online. (Although if you’re anything like me, looking online almost certainly means I’ll diagnose myself with a terminal illness. So, I’m learning to avoid that “online” answer for medical advice.)Finally, if we want to experience God, where do we look? Before we give some quick answers, like “look online”, let’s dwell on that question today. “Where do we look to experience God?”…
Feast of Mary, Mother of Jesus
If you’re anything like me, you probably have a healthy number of questions. I wonder things like: Why didn’t Trump use a better word than “wherever” to describe the blood coming out of Megyn Kelly? Or why do I have to pay Hulu to watch commercials? And I’ve often wondered, “Why should I care about Mary, the mother of Jesus?” After all, as a Lutheran Mary has not played anything more than a passive role in my life. So when I went to a Roman Catholic high school I would ask a lot of questions about her. I’d talk with my teachers about their answers, especially since most dogma about Mary was codified quite recently and isn’t explicitly supported Biblically…
Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost
It was like a scene from a horror movie on that dark morning at the social service agency where I used to work. Everyone was silent and somber, with pain, venom and grief burning in the shadows of their eyes. A cloudy essence reigned free throughout the building, smelling oddly like smoke… What happened, you ask? Did someone die? Did we lose that major federal grant we had spent weeks working on, or have a donor back out on much-needed funds to feed our hundreds of needy clients? Did some cataclysm occur that numbered our days in the office? No, it was worse than all of that, far worse – the coffee pot in the breakroom was out of action…