A sermon on Luke 8:26-39 (for an audio recording of this sermon, click here.) What is the value of a human life? It’s not a simple question. Especially when you consider the variety of contexts in which it arises: - from debates about end-of-life protections and rights, to those about when life begins; - from budget decisions about safety net programs, to the profits we allow in the private prison industry; - from campus responses to sexual assault, to the way our justice system responds to police-involved shootings; - from approaches to health care reform, to policies about refugees.... What we believe about the value of human life, and especially about whose lives matter, are at the center
A sermon on John 16:12-15 [for an audio recording of this sermon, click here] When my oldest child was just three years old, she asked me to explain the Trinity. I was thrilled that she wanted to understand God better, but also totally confounded. Trying to answer that question - in words that even a spiritually and verbally precocious pre-schooler could understand - was more challenging than any of the heavily footnoted research papers that I wrote in graduate school. I don’t remember what I said, but I’m sure that my answer was insufficient. The theology that they teach you about the Trinity is seminary couldn't help me. It's so esoteric, folded into complicated language that, as often as
A sermon on John 14:8-17, 25-27, Acts 2:1-21, and Romans 8:14-17 (or an audio recording of this sermon, click here) After the sermon today, I get to do one of my favorite tasks as a pastor. I get to baptize a new sibling into the beloved family of God. Baby Gavin will be brought to the font by his parents and godparents. We will all make promises, and we will pray for him, and I will pour water over his fuzzy, baby head and baptize him in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And after that, when it almost feels like we’re all done, there will be a moment when I lean over to trace a cross on his forehead, and I will tell him that he is “sealed by the Holy Spirit and marke
A sermon on John 17:20-26 and Acts 16:16-34 [for an audio recording of this photo, click here] A couple of years ago, not long after I began serving here, at Abiding Peace, I had an unexpected interaction with a casual friend. Our families socialize pretty regularly, so he was aware of my recent career change and we had had a few conversations about it. He and his family are members of a Reformed church, so he was interested in learning the similarities and differences with Lutheran practice. This particular evening, he approached me with an excited smile, and asked me if I had “heard the news.” “We are going to be colleagues!” He said, “I was just asked to serve on the Session at my church.
