In this sermon we consider what hope and judgment have to do with each other. We look at the line from the Apostle's Creed, that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. With a little help from C.S. Lewis’s book The Great Divorce, we reflect on God’s love as something that can feel like heaven or hell, depending on how you receive it.

In this sermon we talk a little more about hope and pain, particularly how our cries against pain and suffering is an act of rebellion that God welcomes. It is to say that these are not things God desires. We look at Psalm 130, Job, Paul and Ivan Karamazov in order to understand what it means to find comfort in Christ and to be a comfort for others.

In this sermon we look at hope in relation to the problem of evil and suffering. This is one of the biggest hangups when it comes to belief in God. We talk about how a proper understanding of God in relation to creation helps us understand why evil and suffering can exist in the first place and why we can still call God good.

In this sermon we talk about hope by asking the question of which direction you are looking. Are you looking backwards in hopes of returning to a lost perfection or forwards in hopes of becoming what God made us for? We talk about hope in action (stories about Eusebius, Saint Francis, and Maximillian Kolbe) as we await the coming day of the Lord.

In this sermon we continue our series on resilience and hope by looking at how it is our hope that is resilience even if we ourselves are not. We talk about what people say about resilience, what difference the gospel makes as to how we understand it, how hope and resilience mean we do not have to get out of life alive, and The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity as exemplary of resilience and hope.

Hi, Church -

So, there’s this thing that happens to churches these days where we are tempted to respond to decline by chasing relevance. These words, of course, need some definition.

Decline, we might say, is what we are tempted to feel when congregations shrink in size, when finances get tight, and when buildings decay. It’s a sense of stagnation.

Relevance, we might say, is what we are tempted to chase in response to decline through things like a hyper-exertion of energy to grow in numbers, and raising money, and updating the property. A sense of bustling makes us feel good about our church, that we’re becoming relevant to the world.

The problem is that a big congregation, deep pockets, and a building are not essential for what it means to be the church. These things might be a part of a church’s reality (some churches are bigger than others, some have more money, and some have facilities) but they shouldn’t distract us from what matters most, which is actually embodying the way of Jesus.

This is to say that a large congregation, financial stability, and a well-kept church property does not mean that a congregation is close to the heart of God.

I think of the two images Jeremiah uses of a cistern versus flowing waters. We’re told flowing waters (waters of life) are better than a cistern, which is where water becomes stagnate. However, to understand this in terms of decline and relevance we have to clarify what we’re talking about.

If we are spending our energy to appear vital simply because we have numbers, money, and space then we need to rethink what we’re doing. However, if our energy is spent on embodying the love of God in the time we have and places we are given, then the we will find ourselves in the Spirit’s flow.

This means spending time contemplating the incarnation of God in Jesus, mediating on who he was, what he cared about, and why it cost him his life. In this we will know what it means to be witnesses.

And so, church, take some time this morning to begin praying in this way. Allow the Scripture to shape your prayer (the Sermon on the Mount is a good place to start). And wait for God’s encounter.

See you at 10:30am.

Grace and Peace,

In this sermon we talk about resilience, hope, abiding as a long obedience, the formation of Yosemite, Michelangelo’s David, how a Steinway Piano is made, and what happens when we stay put with God in the life of prayer.

In this sermon we continue the series we started last week on hope and resilience. Here we talk about bad ways of thinking about hope, what the first century Greco-Roman world thought about hope, what the formation of Yosemite of millions of years has to teach us about the power of time in the life of faith, what pie and ice cream teaches us about the hope reserved for us in heaven, and of course The Shawshank Redemption.