Keys that Open

Sermon on Matthew 16:13-20
You can tell a lot about a community by the way they treat keys. At one of my previous churches, someone told us that people around there didn’t lock their doors, although they probably should. Looking back, that seemed to be their defining characteristic–not doing things they knew they should do.

A Glutton, a Drunkard, and a Cow

Sermon on Matthew 11:16-19
Here we are, on yet another Sunday evening, and I still don’t really know what I’ll be doing. We tried an experiment last time, and that seemed to go all right. I thank you for letting me experiment with my preaching. I think becoming more comfortable getting off book will help me as a preacher in the long run. However, the problem with growing as a preacher is that your preaching seems a little worse for a little while. It’s like moving from t-ball to little league, or from little league to varsity. The rules are different, the expectations are different, and you have to figure out where you belong in the new order.

How to Be a Dog

Sermon on Matthew 15:10-28
One of the strangest things about being a pastor is how people treat you differently than they might otherwise. I’m not sure if people in other professions have things like this happen to them, but people can change completely once I answer the question, “So what do you do for a living?”

Love calls us to the things of this world

Sermon on Matthew 14:22-33
Some years back, there was some flooding in my part of Arkansas. We lived right on the Mississippi River, in really low-lying country, so floods, especially flash floods, hit us pretty often. During one of these floods, things had gotten pretty bad, and the National Guard had been activated by the governor to help with evacuations.

Evolution

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
About ten years ago, when I was in college, my parents embarked on a campaign of redecorating. My grandparents were moving in with them, so they began by recarpeting and repainting my and my brother’s old bedrooms in preparation for them, but it didn’t stop there. Each room got something. What had been a living room/dining room became a larger formal parlor. What had been a den became a living room. With the den gone, my parents needed an informal place to hang around, a comfortable place.

God’s imagination and our idols

Sermon on Daniel 14:1-22 (Bel and the Dragon 1:1-22)
I thought that, since I have been given this opportunity to preach on Sunday evenings, that it might be fun and beneficial if I tool this as an opportunity to preach on some passages that don’t appear on the lectionary, which I usually follow. This is from an apocryphal book called by some Bel and the Dragon, and included in some traditions as the fourteenth chapter of the Book of the Prophet Daniel. Do you know what the apocrypha is? The apocrypha are books of the Hebrew Scriptures that were not preserved in Hebrew, only in Greek. Since the early Protestants placed a great emphasis on textual authenticity and authority, those books that weren’t preserved in their original language were excluded from the translations of the bible they made. Since the translators of the KJV didn’t include the apocrypha, and the KJV was the English standard for centuries, they aren’t included in most English translations. You usually have to buy a special version of the bible if you want to read them, although Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians include them as part of their canon.

How to avoid getting in God’s way.

Sermon on Matthew 13:24-30
I imagine that one of the hardest parts about being God is always seeing everyone in the best light. I went to seminary in St. Louis, and I had to drive on the major interstates during rush hour fairly often. Sometimes I’d take I-64 back to Illinois, which could be a real pain. You had to take I-55 north from campus and merge on to I-64. The only problem was that there was only one merger lane for one of the busiest interchanges in the country, so traffic would back up for miles and miles. It could take an hour or more to travel that last half mile before the merger.

Toad violates copyright.

Sermon on Matthew 13:1-9
“Listen! Let anyone with ears listen!” Is there any more desperate plea in all of Jesus’ ministry? “Listen! Let anyone with ears listen!” To me, that sounds more desperate, more pleading, than even, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” There is a tone of fear and of sorrow in that one cry that surpasses most of Jesus’ other pleas. “Listen! Let anyone with ears listen!”

The Good Work of Doubt

Semon on John 20:19-31
I need to make one thing clear–doubt is not the opposite of faith. Doubt is the soil from which faith must spring. I am a doubter. I am a skeptic. Unless you have a skeleton, don’t some talking to me about the Loch Ness Monster. If all you have is a blurry picture of a moving light, don’t tell me you have proof of a ghost. I’m not saying these things don’t exist–it’s just that I’ve never seen any proof. As Paul Simon sang, “Faith is an island in the setting sun, but proof, child, proof is the bottom rung for everyone.” And, until just a few years ago, I would have said, like Thomas, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

We say good-bye, and God says hello.

Sermon on Matthew 10:40-42
It seems a little odd to me that my farewell sermon here is about greeting people. It’s like that Beatles song, I guess: “You say good-bye, and I say hello.” If you’re like me, you’ll have that stuck in your head for the rest of the day. I suppose that this is just one of the strange little things you encounter when you follow the lectionary. I joked about this last week, when the gospel lection included the passage about Jesus “coming to turn a man against his father” and “whoever loves father more than me is not worthy of me.” Three years ago, when that passage was last on the lectionary, it fell on Fathers’ Day. This can create problems, but it can also help us remember things we might otherwise forget. So as we say good-bye, the lectionary is saying hello.