Worship » Sermons

The rabbis set the marriageable age for women at 12 and men at just 13. While life expectancy was different then, and adolescence was very different then, families raised their children to be prepared for marriage by these ages. The reality is that this is very likely a story about a very, very young woman…

[Jesus] he is speaking to people who are afraid, people who cannot imagine what the morning will look like, people who cannot imagine what home is like anymore. When Isaiah talks about “the way,” the way is a highway for the people—all the people. Not the parade route for the conquering general, it is the…

…repentance—confession and forgiveness—calls to an end old ways of being in the world, calls to an end shame, and guilt, and self-justification, in favor of the justification of God, which makes possible the new creation: guided no longer by this rigid avoidance of sin, we’re free in Christ to serve one another, free in Christ…

This is the heart of God with us, that God who carries everything with us, who pays attention with us. So, this is what Jesus offers to Matthew’s community, and to us. Keep awake, he says. Oh, honey, you are here: so keep awake to your pain. Keep awake to your grief. Keep awake to…

…what if we believe that the end of time is God’s grace reconciling us to God and one another? What if we believe that the end of time looks like what Mary describes in her song at the beginning of Luke’s gospel: lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things, coming to our…

… the fact still remains – life isn’t fair. We simply have to look around to see the truth of that. Some start out with more power or privilege simply based on the family they were born into. We know that children’s success is correlated to the zip code in which they live —and therefore…

At the end of our lives, the world asks, “What did you make of yourself?” “What is your legacy?” “What is your claim to fame?” But we don’t spend this day like the “In Remembrance” video at the Oscars, recalling the famous and beautiful and seemingly perfect. We remember the people whose way was strikingly ordinary, and also, somehow, infused with divine…

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has noted that modern life is all about making the world more available, accessible, useful, and controllable. But to do so requires “constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation” at the cost of alienating us “from the world, ourselves, and each other.” (See Note 1) Alienation is the cost of control, but gratitude… gratitude reconnects us to God,…

This constant refrain beats through our lives, if we can do better, we can prove our worth. If we can prove our worth, we can earn our belovedness. And this is a moment where that seems to really matter — being better and proving our worthiness and being beloved in the eyes of the world….

When the New Covenant is written in our hearts, when we receive the forgiveness of sins and become righteous before God by grace through faith, the good we do for our neighbor naturally flows as the fruit of the Spirit, a gift from God. We are free to serve our neighbor because we are freed…

I don’t want our community to fail people, leaving them to face injustice alone like the widow had to. It is hard to persist in wrestling when you are wrestling alone, yet I waver between wanting to wrestle it all and being too overwhelmed to do anything. 

We do live in the richest country in the world; nearly all of us are quite wealthy by the world’s definition. We cannot read this story and not think about the Lazarus at our own gate: people who live without adequate shelter, food, clothing, health care, and mental health care. But—many people in our community,…

God is a shepherd who throws a feast over one lost sheep, a woman hosting a party for one lost coin, a father celebrating one ornery kid, and, well, that tidy pattern grinds to a halt here, God is God, who forgives the unforgivable, redeems the unredeemable. God is a steward who takes on risk on those no one else is risky…

The cross frees us from the need to make sense of the violence we suffer—the senseless violence we suffer, that people suffer, that creation suffers. The cross does not require a lesson to be learned, a pithy moral to be internalized, a new habit adopted. The cross is God’s strongest condemnation of all that harms us—gunshots,cancer, internet hot takes. The cross doesn’t damn…

You don’t need me to tell you, Beloved, that we live in divided times. That we’re constantly being asked to pick a side, to choose: men or women, gay or straight, cis or trans, citizen or immigrant, conservative or progressive. Choose, choose, choose—and sometimes the right thing to do is to choose, because silence always benefits power, always benefits the oppressor, as holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel…

It is simply too easy for the powerful to invoke the name of God as they condemn those without resources. It is simply too easy for the powerful to say this is sin, but what I have done is not sin. I mean, it is simply to easy for me to do that. In an effort to prove that I am worthy of God’s…

There is an indigenous philosophy… told by the linguist Daniel Everett who was asking a hunter what he would do with excess meat, thinking the hunter would talk about storage techniques.But the hunter was confused, why would he store if? He would invite his neighbors and they would feast together on the meat. He said, “Store my meat? I store my…

We’re so certain we can prevent tragedy, that this is not only possible but part of our purpose… we’re so certain that we have no problem, then, casting blame on victims, blaming the drowning for the rain, those beneath the rubble for the earthquake. And if that won’t stick, then we pin it on God— God’s honor, God’s anger, God’s apparently quite fragile self-esteem. But God…

It is really good for business, really good for big business, if people are taught they can’t handle death. If they’re taught that it needs to be hidden away. Like, we have all these euphemisms about death— passing away, going to a better place, and the like, and little phrases that often do more harm than good, about how God needs more angels, or…

God is a like a bridegroom who loses track of time and arrives late to his own wedding reception. God is like a boss who loses track of the books, and pays everyone the same, no matter how many hours they worked. God is like a farmer who loses track of where the seeds are scattered and accidentally sows them on…

Our neighbors are worth more than empty calories and saving a few bucks. Jesus is confronting a system that measured everything and everyone by their market value, and he does so by reminding us that God sees every sparrow that falls, counts every hair on our heads, cares for every exploited worker, knows the story of every neighbor reduced to…

The Little Book of Comforts didn’t want to return to the old stories that promised land, power, chosen-ness, exceptionalism. It didn’t want a story whose hope depended on everything going back exactly the way it was before. No one who teeters on the edge of despair will be comforted by getting back everything they had,except for the people whom they…

God promises liberation and restoration, so we must ask, What sets my neighbor free? This is the particular lens we bring to the prophetic conversation as Lutherans. We are not just freed from sin and death for our own sake, but for the sake of the world. We believe that God’s promises are not just…

When we deny grief, when we deny lament, we also deny hope. In our lament, there is space for God to answer. God promises a time when “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” When God “will wipe every tear from our eyes.” When “all things will be…

Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me.” When we welcome children into our worship and in our midst, a space is opened up where God can work – not just in the children’s lives, but in all  of our lives. We can see God through fresh eyes and ears. We can hear…