Jr.'s Sermons

We tend to end up in echo chambers, surrounded by people who look and think a lot like us. The danger of this is that we don’t learn how to be challenged. The spiritual consequence is that we end up missing God – imagining God in our own image rather than learning to let God challenge us. Judas illustrates the reason we need to learn to be vulnerable, to open ourselves to strange friendships.

We work to strike a healthy balance between faith, family, work and all the other elements of our lives. But Jezebel's story shows us that God doesn't ask for balance; God asks for allegiance. How can we seek God first - and why is that good for everything else in our lives?

How do you resolve conflict? Chances are, however you approach a fight, you learned it from your family. Our families shape us for good and for ill. Herodias, the Evil Queen of Jesus’ day, illustrates for us the cost of generational sin. How can we overcome the sins we inherit from our families? And how can we leave a legacy of life for those who come after us?

What does it look like for Christians to be different from the world? Too often, we treat religion as a brand – one more optional lifestyle for people to choose from. But the story of Delilah and Samson illustrates how following God’s counter-cultural way becomes an invitation for those outside the Church – and life for us, too.

What makes you angry? We seldom stop to think about the cause of our anger - particularly whether that cause is justified or not. But we learn from the story of Cain, the first murderer, that anger can be an invitation to slow down and find life before we lash out and do something we'll regret.

If we know the end of the story, we know how to live in the middle. We conclude our series on the Apostle's Creed by exploring how each of the statements in the Creed shape us. How do they help us live now as a people who will live with God forever? How can we begin now reverse engineering our lives to flourish as God intended?

How we think about the afterlife shapes how we live today. Christians confess we believe our bodies will be raised. What implications does this have for how we live in the here and now? What does this mean for how we treat the world and each other?

Forgiveness is difficult – both as an internal experience and as an external movement to restore the social relationship that’s been broken. But to be the Church is to insist on forgiveness as essential to a fully human life. The journey of forgiveness is fueled by confession – an honest accounting of where we are before God. What does it take for us to be a people who insists on forgiveness?

What does it mean to be a Church? Church isn't a building - it's the people of God, all over the world and across time. How do we be part of the Church? When we find our place as part of the universal, worldwide church it grounds us in how we can be a source of life and hope for our immediate community.

We’re deeply skeptical that people can ever really change. But God promised to make us into new creations. The Holy Spirit is the one who transforms us, who brings real and lasting change. A church who believes in the Holy Spirit is a church that holds space for people to encounter the Spirit. We trust and celebrate as the Spirit brings new life.

'Apocalypse' is a scary word - it conjures images of death and destruction at the end of the world. But the Church has long anticipated Jesus' return as Good News. How can we understand Jesus' return such that it helps us understand how we can live today?

Too often, religion is about a new program - seven steps to a deeper faith or four tips to transform your marriage. But the reason Jesus came to earth was because we can't improve ourselves. We're lost under the power of sin. The good news is that his resurrection offers us something better than self-improvement. We have been given the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. How can we learn to wait and notice where the Spirit is at work in our daily lives?

Fear keeps us from risking, from being vulnerable. But confessing that Jesus descended to Hell is an announcement that the power of Death is broken, and that the way of risk and vulnerability truly does lead to life. We can follow Jesus even to the grave, trusting in his resurrection power to bring life where we risk.

When we fail, we want to shrug our shoulders and insist we're 'only human'. Human means limited, doomed to let people down. But Jesus' incarnation invites us to consider that we might be meant for more than we could've imagined.

Awe: we've all experienced it. Those moments under the stars when time slows down. The joy of a child's love. Moments when the sacred seems to burst into our everyday lives. These moments are Jesus, God's Son, inviting us to join in God's life. They're good for us, and we should seek them out more often. How can we find that life?

Hopelessness has taken root in our culture. Many of us wonder if life truly has any meaning at all. The Apostle's Creed opens by affirming that God is the creator. This is not a scientific claim, but an insistence that each of us matters, that we all have a purpose.

For many, belief is the beginning of a relationship with God. But many others struggle with knowing what Christians actually believe. Many more have doubts and questions that are not easily quieted. Is belief really a barrier to a relationship with God? Or can we learn to follow as we learn to believe? Can believe be an invitation to a deeper trust in the God who wants to help our unbelief?

How long can you go without breathing? A minute? Two? Five? We can't do much unless we breathe... and Pentecost reminds us that the Spirit is God's breath in us. How can we take time to breathe in God's Spirit so that we have the power to do what God calls us to in this world?

We tend to quit when relationships get hard – that’s because truly intimate, life-changing relationships take a lot of work. How can we embrace the pain of true community for the sake of our own faith, the faith of others in our community, and ultimately, the faith of our world?

In the face of unspeakable evils in the world, how can we respond? Peter challenged early Christians to remain faithful to live out the story of Jesus. How does that make a difference? How can the Jesus story lived out in our lives be a path of resistance? And how does the resurrection make that resistance possible?