Sermons

It was May of 1987. I had just finished my first year of college. My uncle Bob was about to receive his master’s degree from Oregon State University, and my grandparents wanted to go out and help him celebrate.

Any time you run into a psalm that has exactly 22 or 44 verses, you can be pretty sure it’s an acrostic psalm. It’s totally lost in translation, of course;

Scripture: Psalm 51 Doesn’t it seem like other people’s sins are so much more interesting—not to mention so much worse—than our own? After the incident with Bathsheba and the cover-up resulting in the murder of her husband Uriah, King David got a visit from the prophet Nathan. [1] Nathan didn’t […]

If you want to memorize a Psalm, other than the 23rd (which I would argue everyone should have memorized), this is a good one. It’s short—only three verses—but absolutely packed with theology and help for the spiritual life.

Scripture: Psalm 72 We continue today with the third in our series of Psalms that, at first glance, may or may not be relevant to modern American life. Maybe we don’t like to think about anything in the Bible, the Word of God, as irrelevant. Many of us have been […]

When I was six, my family moved from our little brick house on 2nd Street to a 1953 ranch house on Ohio Street, on the other side of town. On the back fence, right outside my bedroom window, there was a rosebush which had stopped blooming for some reason.

Scripture: Romans 8:14-39 Scripture reader: Judy D. 2011 was a very tough year for Mike and me and our families. It started with a phone call in February or thereabouts. My dad was calling to tell me that my grandpa was sick. He died early in May, and then my […]

At one point in my life I watched a lot of “makeover” shows. Before makeover shows, they were regular features in magazines, especially those aimed toward women and teenage girls. I’m sort of over it now

I’m sure you know the story…it’s probably the best loved story in the Bible.

Somewhere around 1980, a musician by the name of Peter Jones was in his parents’ attic when he came across a bundle of very old letters. They were written to his great-great-grandfather, John Hunt, who had emigrated from County Mayo in Ireland in the 1850s, by his father, Bryan Hunt.

There are lots of stories in the Bible where someone’s name gets changed.
Abram becomes Abraham when God fulfills his promise to make Abraham the father of nations.
Jacob becomes Israel—“one who struggles with God”—after spending a night wrestling with his conscience, an angel, the spirit of the stream he’s camping beside, or God himself.

Every culture has its rules about food—about what can be eaten and what can’t, how things are to be prepared, even how the animals used for meat are treated, slaughtered, and processed.