Sermon Archives

transformation
July 12, 2020

Yield

You know what I love about Berkey’s community garden project? It’s simplicity. Think about it: All we’re doing is making space out back, offering our soil, giving our dirt, for people to grow some vegetables. That’s it. And the thing is, we can’t really pat ourselves on the back about that, at least not too […]

January 20, 2019

Becoming Aware and Giving Our Consent

On a cold Sunday morning in February 1971, I was baptized at a small mission church. Since our church was so tiny, I was the only one baptized that day. When the time came, I knelt at the front of the sanctuary; the pastor poured water on my head; pronounced the words of baptism; then […]

December 23, 2018

Tell God I Say Yes

Billy was a kid in the neighborhood who had a rough edge, a rowdy kid who pushed other people’s buttons. He hung out with my younger brothers and was in and out of our home. One day when Billy was 10 years old, my Mom got a call from Billy’s mom, a single parent with […]

October 14, 2018

Weight Lifting

We call it the Ketchup Revolution in our family.                                And it happened after my parents had been married for many years and patterns were well established. My dad fixed things and my mom served meals.  So one night after we had all started eating dinner, my dad said, “Ketchup.”                              (There was no ketchup on the […]

February 4, 2018

Come and See

A few weeks ago, after work I took a look at my news feed on my phone. I find that over the past year I do so with a great amount of fear and trepidation.  I was amazed that a certain crude, descriptive word, not censored, no stars or symbols where certain letters should be, […]

October 30, 2016

Recalculating!

When Ruth and I are traveling we often use GPS to give us directions to get to the specific  of the place we are visiting.  Sometimes the voice from the GPS interrupts our travel with the single word, “Recalculating.”  When that happens, we have a choice to make:  do we turn back to get on […]

March 2, 2014

At the Peak

This story seems unreal. The face of Jesus switching from a lovely brown tone into something that shines like the sun? Come on, how is that possible? Or his clothes shifting from tan to white? Fabric can’t do that. And Moses and Elijah appearing side‐by‐side with Jesus? Those guys had been dead for hundreds of […]