Sermons

Awhile back I bought some books from a friend of mine who has a sort of continuing online garage sale going. These books had belonged to his grandmother, who passed away a couple years ago. They were mostly “how-to” books; one was intended to teach knitting, crocheting (which I already know how to do), and other handcrafts.

The Sermon on the Mount, as it’s presented in Matthew chapters 5 through 7, is pretty loosely organized. There’s a lot in there, too. We’re spending the summer in these three chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, and we will barely scratch the surface of it.

The Iowa caucuses, for my party, at least, are sort of fun. (The other party’s caucus, I’m told, is a whole lot more controlled, but ours tends to be quite a bit more free-wheeling and chaotic.) We gather at our designated place on the designated night, and the first thing that happens is some of the local party leaders make a few speeches, then give instructions on what we’re to do. Then supporters of candidate “A” go to one room, and candidate “B”’s supporters go to another one, and so on until all the candidates’ supporters are separated out into their places.

When non-Christians level criticisms at us, one of the main ones is that we tend to be legalistic. They might say we are much too focused on following rules, and especially on enforcing those rules on others.

The Beatitudes, our subject for last week, started out speaking in generalities. Then there was a transition in the middle of the last one. It started out with, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake…” and then Jesus turns and looks his listeners in the eye and says, “Blessed are you…”

What does it mean to be happy? It tends to be situational, doesn’t it? We’re happy when we’re having fun, when things are going our way, when people like us, when we’re healthy, when our worries and stresses about jobs and money and the like are at a minimum. Take any of those out of the equation, and would we be happy?

You might be thinking, “That Scripture sure sounds familiar; didn’t we just read it?” You’d be right: it was the text for the Sunday after Easter. At that time I focused mainly on Thomas. But I promised then that we would come back to this text for Pentecost.

Do you know how Portland, Oregon, was named?
Seems that the founders of the city, Asa Lovejoy of Boston and Francis Pettygrove of Portland, Maine, could not agree on which of their hometowns to name the new city after. Eventually they decided to decide the issue by a best-two-of-three coin toss. Pettygrove won, and the city became Portland, Oregon Territory.

Recently we did something we hadn’t done in this country since I was a very small child. We went back to the moon. The Artemis crew didn’t land on it, as Apollo 11 first did when I was a year old, but they did fly around it, and took a lot of really good pictures.

When I was little, our church had a library, with a librarian who was there on Sundays to help us find things and check books out.
These days a lot of churches are doing away with their libraries. In some cases, the church feels like its library just duplicates the work of the local public library. Libraries these days, much more so than when I was growing up, use a lot of technology, which many churches can’t really put in place, for a variety of reasons.
But I believe that, even if we give away the books in the rooms we had once set aside for that purpose, every church still has a library.

One time there was a King had three girls. He was getting very old, so he called his daughters one day and told them, says, “There’s a question I want answered and I want the truth.” Looked at the oldest, says, “How much do you love me?”

This is one of those passages in the Bible that contain the makings of several sermons.
I could talk this morning about how, in the first five verses, Jesus fulfills several of the promises he made in the long conversation he had with the disciples at the Last Supper, back in chapters 14 through 16 of John’s Gospel. Or I could talk about the change in the disciples between verse 19—where they’re hiding in fear behind locked doors—and verse 26, in which they’re in the same place but seem no longer to be afraid.