Sermons

The 18th Sunday after Pentecost

September 27, 2026

Good morning

I’m here to talk about my approach to recommitment, as we are in the season of recommitment here at Seekers Church.  But before going there, I have been invited to respond to the earlier questions of what brought me to Seekers and how that has impacted my spiritual life.  Those questions have been the subject of a series of recent sermons and do relate to recommitment. 

Coming to Seekers

Brenda and I finished law school in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1983, and I clerked for a federal judge there for two years.  But we were clear that we needed a more international location for our careers and young family, as we had both grown up in Japan as missionary kids.  I went to the senior pastor of the progressive church we sometimes attended in downtown Kansas City and asked if he had a church recommendation for us in DC, where I had just landed a job at a big law firm.  As I recall, the pastor had only one suggestion – the Church of the Saviour. 

The 17th Sunday after Pentecost

September 20, 2026

At Seekers, we have entered Recommitment Season. This is the period of time leading up to Recommitment Sunday (the third Sunday in October) during which members of Seekers are invited to examine their commitment to Seekers and decide whether they are called to recommit to Seekers for another year. Today I want to talk about what commitment means at Seekers Church and the role mission groups play in commitment.

The first thing I did when I started preparing this sermon was to look back at Elizabeth O’Connor’s book, Call to Commitment. She wrote this book in 1963 as a member of the Church of the Saviour, from which Seekers evolved. Rather than treating church primarily as a place to attend worship, the Church of the Saviour understood it as a community where people discerned their call, made commitments, and supported one another in living them out. Its members formed small groups and specialized ministries, including work with people experiencing poverty, homelessness, and other forms of marginalization. Seekers has maintained these traditions.

The 16th Sunday after Pentecost

September 13, 2026

You’ve noticed by now that this morning’s worship has been different, but at the same time recognizably the same to what we do on a typical Sunday morning.      

It’s been the same in that it has been built on the strong bones of a liturgical structure reliably holds our praise, our prayers, our readings, and our reflections each Sunday.

It’s been different most notably in that our readings have included readings from different faith traditions, and come in an unexpected order that has the Gospel reading first. . Maybe not as obviously, many of the prayers offered this morning have been informed by those of other faith traditions as well.  

The word “liturgy” translates from the Greek as “work of the people”, and the people who have worked to shape today’s liturgy are all individuals who were part of a 6-week course on Interspirituality in the School of Christian Growth this last spring. The sessions explored the lived meaning of the term, Interspirituality,  and provided an opportunity to experience just the thinnest slice of the vast range of spiritual wisdom available in the world’s faith traditions beyond our own.

The 15th Sunday after Pentecost

September 6, 2026

The opportunity Seekers has given this Summer Season has special meaning for me.  My decision to attend Seekers has been foggy from the start.  This exercise has given me the opportunity to figure some things out. 

First, I want to describe my life history because I found that helps me understand.  I know I am a believer in God, Jesus, and the Holy One.  Never have I questioned this strong belief.  I was born into a Lutheran Church family my father was a pastor.  My mother was a fulltime mother when I was young.  She returned to teaching after the birth of my 2 younger brothers.  Once I was older, it seemed curious that spiritual rituals like praying at mealtimes, and night time rituals, were all addressed in routine prayers.  I knew from other families who had times of spiritual talks together that some families are different.  We had no devotions, no discussions, nothing spiritually spontaneous.

Privately I wondered.  But that sort of talk was not part of our family interactions.  It was our way, so it never occurred to me.  Yet at the same time, I had many thoughts and feelings of what I now call spirituality.

The 14th Sunday after Pentecost

August 30, 2026

This season, we’ve been answering the prompt “What brought us to Seekers and how that has informed our spiritual development” from the pulpit. I’m so thankful for the generosity of replies we’ve heard so far. Both of those questions have very quick answers for me, I thought, but today I’m going to try to go deeper on each of them.

When I first considered the first part of this question about “What brought me to Seekers”, the answer seemed simple and obvious– what brought me to Seekers was that I noticed it! I had just moved to town in 2020 and I liked the building’s exterior aesthetic, specifically that white font on the brick wall, so I started finding myself daydreaming about what might happen in here, and looked it up online, and decided to check out a service!

I love telling this story of chancing upon a place that would become something so significant as my spiritual home, because my theology can generally be summed up as “God is Chance” (not to be confused with Octavia Butler’s not dissimilar “God is change!)” In this world, there’s the explainable and the unexplainable. And in that element of unpredictability, well what is that but God? I love the idea of God as chance. I feel closest to him when I’m surprised by something or in awe of something, and that’s exactly what I feel when a slim chance happens, or when things line up just right and at the right time. My friend Laura put a word to that for me– synchronicity. What brought me to Seekers was a moment of synchronicity– finding a spiritual home because I liked the font.