Sermons Archives

Conflict Births Reconciliation: Love is not a feeling. Love is a practice.

September 10, 2023

I have witnessed how conflict has been faced in healthy ways and in not so healthy ways in a variety of faith communities. I have been in healthy conflict and I have also been in unhealthy conflict. Unhealthy ways of dealing with conflict, like triangulation – complaining to people about a person we refuse to speak to directly – avoids the hard work required of love. Erich Fromm famously writes, “Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, love is a practice.”

Heart Attack: the Illusion of Independence

September 3, 2023

Most preachers I know are always on alert for a good story to enliven their sermons: a compelling anecdote, a funny personal experience, a touching memory. Craig tells us tales of growing up in Zimbabwe; Jered talks about stalking defenseless mushrooms in the forest, Chelsea has spoken about her job with immigrants….

Today, I happen to have a doozy of a story….

A Pianist, A Pop Song, and A Prayer: The Risk of Salvation Requires Trust

August 21, 2023

This morning’s sermon will consist of three short reflections on today’s Scriptures. The first involves a story about my favorite classical pianist. The second my favorite pop song. And the third is one of my favorite prayers.

Childish or Childlike? Holy Wisdom Hangs in the Balance

July 10, 2023

Do you ever look at a person and imagine what they were like as a child? This is a skill I try to cultivate when I am faced with people who are difficult. And, of course, the most difficult person I have ever met, is myself!

Holy Interruptions

July 2, 2023

“… The call of God on our lives interrupts our allegiance to the often death dealing, sacrificial systems of the world. God’s call, interrupts the economies that exploit, interrupts the politics that prioritize power over generosity, that prizes our love of guns over the lives of our children, that puts “national interest” over the imperative to welcome strangers and immigrants. The call of the one true God, the God of Abraham and Sarah of Isaac and Rebekah and Leah, of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ, is a call away from the all the plans we once had, interrupts the business as usual of the world and calls us into a faith that feeds the hungry, visits and cares for the sick, listens to the story of the lonely and the abandoned, that let’s Christ show up in all the interruptions of the life of ministry and discipleship…”

Music Sunday Sermon

June 4, 2023

Being Translated: Receive and Release the Reconciling Love of the Holy Spirit

June 2, 2023

A sermon by the Rev. Craig Lemming for Pentecost Sunday: “As we renew our Baptismal Covenant together, in this intimate space, we invite the Holy Spirit to be in our voices, to create beautiful memories, to hear the sounds of new life, to feel God’s healing in all of our bodies, to be reconciled in right relationship with the multiplicities of peoples and races and creatures in this land. Come, Holy Spirit, and translate us into the language of Christ’s love.”

Don’t Look Up, Look Around

May 21, 2023

A Sermon Preached for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A by the Rev’d Jered Weber-Johnson It seems kind of strange today for me during

Facing God

May 9, 2023

“The way to God, is not a way that leads us out of this world. God can be known and experienced, God’s power can be shared and apprehended, God’s face is available to us, right here, and right now. Jesus says, he is the way and the truth and the life, and invites us to know him. So look for him, friends, by loving others, by serving, by seeing and knowing that each face around you is shimmering with the glory and grace of a God who loves you and all of creation with a fierce and unending love. Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have seen the face of God.”

A Sermon by Jenny Koops

April 30, 2023

The sheepfold stands in contrast to the reality in which we live, where we
are told that we cannot rest, because there isn’t and never will be enough,
that we must always keep working for more and more and more. But the
sheepfold is a place of rest that God is calling us to, to lie down in green
pastures as we read in psalm 23, and taking time to rest in our physical
sacred spaces like the one we are in today, helps not only reinvigorate us
to go back out into the world to share and invite others into God’s abundance, but also to center us in God’s love so that we may hear and
know God’s voice when we are called.

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