Sermons

When I was in seminary, the Christian church in Coffeyville gave me a small scholarship. That was the church where my grandparents went, and served as deacons and on search committees, where my parents were married, where my aunts and uncle and cousin grew up. In return, the church folks asked me to come and preach for them.

Writing job descriptions requires some fairly unique skills. The main question is how to outline the basic duties of a position, without ruling out the possibility that the employee may be called on to do things that aren’t spelled out in the description.

A very long time ago, when I was a little kid, the Peanuts comic strip had a week-long storyline about a new kid in the neighborhood with an unusual name: 5.

It seems like whenever a story about Jesus healing someone with an illness or disability shows up in a lectionary, there’s a discussion about how—or even whether—we should preach about healing.

Used to be that people thought you could tell a lot about someone by their handwriting.

We mainline Christians, children of the Enlightenment that we are, have bought into the notion that religion is a private matter, just between us and God, just about our individual, personal salvation. But this notion of religion as having only to do with whether or not I am saved so I go to heaven when I die, but otherwise no bearing on how this world operates, has been used to perpetuate some terrible things.

Josiah’s great-grandfather was Hezekiah, described as doing right in the sight of the LORD, who had faced down the Assyrians when they came to try and conquer Jerusalem.

Today we turn from the historical books of the Old Testament to the prophetic writings.

A polio epidemic raged out of control in the little English village of Standing. The hospital was filled with children fighting for their lives, unable to walk or—in some of the worst cases—breathe on their own. Nearly every day a quarantine sign appeared on the door of another house.

Maybe Rehoboam would have done better if he’d had access to Twitter.

In the days following the Babylonian Exile, when the people returned to Jerusalem and rebuilt the city and the Temple, the scribe Ezra became very distressed that so many of his people, including religious leaders, had married foreign women and had children with them

We’re skipping a lot of time and a lot of material between last week’s reading, the story of Moses’ birth and the women who made his life possible, plus the first part of his call story.