Sermons

October 25, 2015

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

As the Message for this morning, Celebration Circle (of which I am a member) is going to demonstrate for you a part of our process in which we invite God to speak to us and shine through us.

In preparing for each liturgical season, Celebration Circle has five tasks: 

·         To establish a theme

·         To select a reading to serve as the Reflection 

·         To write the liturgy

·         To design and create a bulletin cover 

·         To design and create the altar display, sometimes incorporating other                 portions of the sanctuary, as well. 

Our next liturgical season will be Advent, which begins in 5 weeks.  To help you understand how we do what we do, this morning – before your very eyes – we’re going to conduct the first step of our process – to establish a theme for Advent.  This has not been rehearsed – we are doing this in real time.  We hope you find it interesting, and perhaps instructive or maybe even enlightening.

Shall we begin?

October 18, 2015

Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

What do you take seriously? Do you take the Bible seriously? Or is it just a bunch of once-upon-a-time stories that you can take or leave, depending on your mood? Do you take God seriously? Who or what is this God that created the earth “while all the choruses of morning stars sang and the heavenly court shouted for joy”[Job 38:7] and yet is somehow closer than our very breath? Do you take your spiritual life seriously? Do you think of your spiritual life as not just whether you pray, journal, and read scripture, but also how those practices affect your relationships with others, your ability to forgive, your sense of gratitude, your sense of joy? What do you take seriously?

October 11, 2015

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

It is Recommitment Season at Seekers.  It seems fitting to me that our season of recommitment occurs during the time of growing cold and darkness that follows the Autumnal Equinox in September.  The days are growing shorter and the nights longer.  On November 1^st, Daylight Savings time ends and even our afternoons grow dark.   We are heading into the darkness which does not begin to recede until after the Winter Solstice, which occurs right around the time we celebrate the birth of Jesus.

Susan Cooper’s poem about the Winter Solstice gives a sense of how humans have always feared this dark time of year and how much we rejoice when the light begins its return.  I’ll read it.

September 27, 2015

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Being embodied is a strange experience.  Oh, wait a minute – I guess I mean “being alive.”  How could I be alive without my body?  All right, then, being alive is a strange experience.  It’s a kind of user illusion, isn’t it?  I locate my “self” up “here,” in my “head” — notice how I have to use these scare-quotes constantly, since none of it is really “true” — and this “self” seems to experience all kinds of freedom and independence – I can think anything, imagine whatever I please – while the body, “down below,” politely gets out of the way.  Better yet, my “self” can start giving orders to that body at a moment’s notice, and lo and behold, the body obeys! or at least it tries to.

September 13, 2015 

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

“Get out of my sight, you Satan!”  Ouch!  Can you image how much that statement hurt, when Jesus aimed it at Peter – Peter, the one who loved him so!  And what was Peter’s sin, what caused Jesus to label him as Satan?

In the reading, Jesus says that Peter’s sin was “judging by human standards rather than by God’s” or, in the words of a different translation, “setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”  (I don’t know about you, but I frequently judge by human standards & think about human things – so Jesus has my attention.)