Liturgy: Elisha Heals Naaman - 2 Kings 5:1-15a (November 6, 2022)

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Call to Worship

Leader: Come, all you saints!
People: We come to worship the Lord!

Sermon: "Speak Up!", 2 Kings 5:1-15a (November 6, 2022)

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I haven’t heard it yet personally (I’ve been checking), but now that we’re past Halloween, I suspect that we’ll soon be hearing Christmas music on the radio. Although I firmly believe that the anticipatory aspect of Advent is a crucial part of our liturgical year and our faith, I don’t mind hearing these tunes outside the context of worship in November and December. It helps me to plan ahead and mentally prepare for the upcoming liturgical seasons, and of course, who can’t use a little extra joy these days?

Sermon: "A Good Worth Boasting About", 2 Kings 5:1-14/Galatians 6:7-16 (July 3, 2022)

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What would you say is the highest good? What is the principle that’s most worth standing up for, whose pursuit leads to the best possible existence? Is it beauty? Wisdom? Maybe on this Independence Day weekend, you’d say “Freedom”. Actually, our founding fathers couldn’t decide on just one; they gave “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” all equal standing as far as the values upon which our budding nation would be built. Today, of course, there are plenty of different opinions in our country about which is truly the GREATEST good. Different groups have created entire identities around their consensus in this matter. For example, in American Christianity today, it seems that we’ve collectively agreed to “life” as being the good that we value the highest.

Sermon: “Superman-tle”, 1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21/2 Kings 2:1-6, 11-14 (June 26, 2022)

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In the scant free time that Nick and I have in common these days, we’ve been working our way through all of the CW superhero shows on Netflix. We’ve finished “Green Arrow” and caught up on “The Flash”. Now we’re on the second season of “Supergirl”. I thought I knew the basics of most of the main superheroes, but it turns out that I didn’t really know much about Supergirl. Apparently, the premise of the original comics was slightly different from the TV series, but the basic idea is the same: Supergirl is Superman’s cousin, whose parents also sent her to Earth because of Krypton’s imminent destruction.

Sermon: “Unearned, Unasked-for, Undeserved”, 2 Kings 5:1-14/Luke 10:1-11, 16-20 (July 7, 2019)

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Let’s talk about privilege.

For some, it’s a dirty word. It immediately puts us on the defensive, and we feel like our struggles and challenges are being ignored. We feel like it minimizes the hard work that we put in to get where we are. We feel like we’re being told that we’re a bad person. But interestingly, there’s another word that means almost exactly the same thing which for some reason doesn’t have the same distressing connotation to us, one that we Christians are often comfortable with and even eager to apply to ourselves

Sermon: "Lose the Recipe", 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14/Galatians 5:1, 13-25 (June 30, 2019)

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Do you ever wonder what scripture would look like if the early Christians hadn’t screwed up so much?

I do. I mean, Paul’s primary motivation for letter-writing was usually to correct some misconception that had been making the rounds in Christian communities, and depending on who you ask, these letters make up anywhere from 30 to almost 50 percent of the New Testament. It was always something with those blockheads: either they were excluding gentiles, or they couldn’t get along with each other, or they were pledging their allegiance to specific teachers instead of to Christ, or they were keeping other people as personal property…they just couldn’t seem to get it right, no matter how many times Paul yelled at—err, wrote to them.