Category: Sermons

Closed Doors to Open Hearts

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Biblical Text: John 20:19-31

I tend to think the best titles are intuitive. The more time you spend thinking about them, the worse they are. The title I put on this sermon is not something that appears in the sermon proper, but it popped into my head as encompassing the entire scope. The Gospel reading takes us from Easter Evening through the following Sunday with Thomas and ends with a note that sure sounds like an ending to book. To me there are three scenes. The first scene is a picture of personal spiritual life. The second scene (Thomas) is a picture of how the church works in this world, or how individuals are brought to that point of being born again. The final scene is a reminder of all the ways the church might fail, but where she always finds renewal. It is a text that takes us from Closed Doors due to fear to open hearts living the Christian life even at great risk.

Recording note: In service we had a member of the congregation who had a health issue. He was being taken care of by a couple members of the congregation and as long as it doesn’t seem like a life threatening emergency I tend to continue on. Let people who know what they are doing have the space. But at one point when it started to look worse, I did pause before picking back up.

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Confronting Fears at the Tomb

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Biblical Text: Mark 16:1-8

So much of Easter is the Hymns. I hate chopping them out, but the truth is they just don’t record as well. The place is not mic’ed up for that. But when the text of the day is Mark’s Easter account, you get to preach on something unique. Mark has the two Mary’s and Salome running from the tomb in fear. And that is where the gospel ends. (The early sermon examines that.) But that ending has a deep existential meaning to all of us. We are all confronted with a couple of fears. The obvious one is fear of death. But without dismissing the dread that creep up, you get to a certain age, you’ve made your peace. But the other one is fear of not being in control. Coming face to face with a man who controls death and who has something for you to do is running right into our lack of control. It is also running into the answer to that. That is the fear Easter addresses in Mark, but we all have to make a decision about that. The sermon expands on that.

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Good Friday 2024

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The service has its bit of theater – the candles are snuffed one at a time after each reading. But what it really it is a reading of the passion story woven together with the great hymns of the day and short meditations. The theme of the meditations this year was “The Way of the Cross”. The recording is the full service. If you want the service bulletin this link contains that

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Where is Christ for Us?

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This is the Maundy Thursday service which commemorates and spotlights the Lord’s Supper, because it was on this night the Supper was instituted. These sermon ponders for a bit Bonhoeffer’s question from his last days in prison: “Where is Christ for Us?” His answer only really comes to us in outline for from letters. And it includes a few phrases that I think cloud the picture for those who picked them up and ran with them. What he was talking about in those letters was the cross. Christ for us is always found at the cross. And Lord’s Supper – the body and blood of Christ – is one place we always find the cross. The sermon meditates on this.

Behold Your King

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Biblical Texts: Palms – John 12:12-19 Passion – Mark 15:1-47

This sermon has two “movements” (man that is a pretentious term). The first is a bit of history about Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday and how we got to them being together. The second is a meditation upon the two crowds: the one that sang Jesus into Jerusalem with Palms, and the one that cried crucify. The second movement is really the preaching for the day and takes up most of the sermon. And the really interesting thing from these two texts is the interplay of who calls Jesus “The King of Israel” and who calls him “the King of the Jews”. Israel and “The Jews” are always distinct things. And Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday confirms the difference. Israel is the people of God by faith. They accept this King who comes on colt and cross. “The Jews” are the people from every nation that reject this king, who have no king but Caesar. And that is the crisis of the Kingdom. The King has come, but is this Jesus your King?

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Lenten Midweek 5- Lord’s Prayer

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This is the final sermon in the Lenten Midweek series. We reviewed the first portion of the Catechism with emphasis on the creed (MW 2,3 & 4). The Law was MW1 and this MW5 is the Lord’s Prayer. We used the third petition as the text. The arrangement of Luther’s catechism in the Word section drops leaves you at prayer, which is part of Luther’s teaching. The Christian life is a life of prayer. This sermon reflects on what prayer accomplishes and how which are the two questions Luther asks in the catechism: What does this mean? and How is this done?

Cross Hearts

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Biblical Text: Jeremiah 31: 31-34

The law is a covenant that con work on the head. It can work on the gut. The law doesn’t really work on the heart. Our natural hearts are turned elsewhere. What this passage of Jeremiah promises is a covenant with God that works on the heart. That is a covenant that places us at the foot of the cross. This sermon reflects on attempts to read God’s word with the head, and then reading it with the heart. It is much less “heady” than most of mine.

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3rd Article: Where is the Holy Spirit?

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This is the 4th Lenten Midweek. The theme we have been following is the first part of the catechism with a focus on the creed. This week was the third article on the Holy Spirit. This meditation’s theme is the contrast between the airy nature of what we typically attribute to “The Spirit” and the very concrete nature of the Spirit in both scripture and creed. If we meditate on the catechism’s explanation the Spirit’s work is the most observable in our daily lives. Taking place in and through the church and the forgiveness of sins.

The Light of the Cross

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Biblical Text: John 3:14-21

There are Sunday were you look at the text have trouble finding any hymns to go with them or any themes that are preachable…and then there is Lent 4 series B. You could preach a year on these three texts. And there are at least 3 services of great hymns usable, and another 3 that nobody would complain about.

Jesus explicitly connect the cross to the episode of Israel and snakes in the wilderness. The pastor’s corner this week (scroll down) wrote that up more fully. But this sermon brings some of that in. What is Jesus connecting to directly? There are a couple of things that the lifting up of the snake does. It is a picture of the toxic nature of our sin. It also makes completely clear the sin and the environment we live in rife with “fiery serpents.” This sermon makes the connections between that OT lesson (Numbers 21:4-9) and the cross. It then examines how the cross goes further. How this is one of the rare places God answers some “why?” questions. It finishes with the encouragement to live the Christian life and our hope stated so clearly by John – eternal life. The cross is the light by which we can see all this.

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Temple Cleaners

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Biblical Text: John 2:13-22

Jesus’ Cleansing of the Temple is both one of the most striking of his actions and maybe the most misunderstood. What we want from it is either permission to whip anyone we disagree with, or to cancel out all acts of zeal. But that just isn’t what this text is about. Looking at it from the Gospel of John helps in these regards as you have to deal with one of the great divergences between John and the Synoptics. Either you think Jesus did something like this twice (highly unlikely), the Synoptics got the timing wrong (all three?!), or John moved it to a special place for a theological reason. And how John tells the story is different is some important ways which is what I think he wants us to focus on. That and he says twice that “the disciples remembered.” And in each case what the disciples remembered were the words of Jesus and the Scriptures. The text is one that reveals Jesus. It has little to do with the act of cleansing the physical temple or telling us when we can fight or not. It has a lot to do with who Jesus is and what he is doing. It reveals God. The sermon follows those thoughts.

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