Sermon: “Stay (A)woke”, Mark 14:32-42 (July 12, 2026)

As we near the end of our sermon series about “disputing with God”, we’ve been given this text, Mark’s version of Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane. It’s pretty clear why this passage wound up in the series: I can’t think of a more intriguing sermon topic than “God arguing with Godself”. I’m sure we’ve all wondered at some point how a prayer from one person of the Trinity to another would work - is it like talking to yourself? Or is it more like a “multiple personality” situation? How can something be both not what Jesus wants, and also what God does want at the same time? There are a lot of fascinating directions that this sort of sermon could take. But as I wrestled with which of these questions I should tackle this week, I found an entirely different one distracting me: why are the disciples reacting SO differently from Jesus in this passage?

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