Sermons

One night in November of 1983, my church youth group met at our leaders’ house to watch a TV movie. Normally we met at the church, of course; but in those days you couldn’t necessarily watch a TV movie at the church, and I think our leaders wanted us in a more comfortable environment, because the movie was going to be pretty troubling.

When we hear the story of the widow’s mite, that’s usually a sign that it’s stewardship season. A stewardship sermon would hold her up as a model of sacrificial giving, and urge us to give similarly. But as is the case with most passages of Scripture, if we expand the reading beyond the four verses that contain the story, the picture looks a whole lot different.

Lately I’ve been watching a British archaeology show called Time Team. The show ended in 2014 after a 20-year run, but all the episodes and specials they produced during that time are on YouTube.

It’s not because of any details in this text, but based on details from Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the same story, that we call this man the “Rich Young Ruler.”

Good old Peter. How can somebody be so smart and so stupid at the same time?

Before we get too far into our reading for today, I want us to get one thing sorted out in our minds. It’s something I’ve been guilty of misunderstanding—a previous sermon I preached on this text relied upon this misunderstanding to make its point.

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.