Sermons

Due to copyright laws, only the final song was recorded. Enjoy!

 

There is no video recording this Sunday due to technical difficulties. 

The Comfort and The Cry 
Text: Isaiah 40:1-11
Speaker: Joel Miller

 

The second coming of the Messiah took place one dull Monday morning as he arrived anonymously at the gates of a great city.  There was much for him to do.  While many years had passed since his last visit, the same suffering was present all around.  Still there were the poor, the sick, and the oppressed.  Still there were the outcasts, and still there were the righteous who pitied them, and the authorities who exploited them.

For a long time no one took any notice of this desert wanderer with his weather-beaten face and ragged, dusty clothes – this quiet man who spent his time living among the sick and unwanted.  The great city labored on, ignorant of the one who dwelled within its streets. 

The Messiah eventually decided to reveal his identity to a chosen few who had remained faithful to his teachings.  These people met together in a small, unknown church on the outskirts of the city to pray and to serve the poor.

As the Messiah entered the modest sanctuary one...

 

 

 

 

Re-Reform 
Text: 2 Kings 22:1–23:4
Speaker: Joel Miller

A number of years ago, church scholar Phyllis Tickle wrote a book called The Great Emergence, Subtitle: How Christianity is Changing, and Why.  Her big theory, as she describes it, is this: “Every five hundred years, the Church cleans out its attic and has a giant rummage sale.”  What she means is that in its 2000 years of existence, the church has undergone four massive historical transitions, roughly 500 years apart. 

The first, straddling the year 500, saw the fall of the Roman Empire, the ecumenical councils, and the rise of monasteries.  The second, just a bit into the thousands, was the great schism between East and West.  The Eastern Orthodox Patriarch and the Roman Catholic Pope excommunicated one another for theological differences that mirrored the politics and economics of the day.  The third was the Protestant Reformation which began in the early 1500s.  Mennonites and other Anabaptists were considered the radical wing of that reformation and, sure enough, we’re...

 

 

The Prophet Considers a God Who Reconsiders
Text: Hosea 11:1-11
Speaker: Joel Miller

In the Hebrew Bible, it is the privilege and the burden of the prophet to speak for God.  That’s quite the job description, to speak for God.  It’s not a form of speech we hear much these days.  When we do, we have every reason to be skeptical. 

But in the biblical world, that’s what the prophet did, and that’s where the narrative lectionary has us hanging out for a bit.  We’re sampling the prophets, hearing them make claims about God and people, interpreting the present and pointing to possible futures.  Or at least their present, in the past, and their possible futures, some of which came to pass, others of which are still out there on our far horizon – like that day when the lion shall lay down with the lamb, and we will all beat our swords into ploughshares, or whatever updated form of military weaponry into whatever form of productive life-giving...

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