Seekers recognizes that any member of the community may be called upon by God to give us the Word, and thus we have an open pulpit with a different preacher each week. Sermons preached at Seekers, as well as sermons preached by Seekers at other churches or events, are posted here, beginning with the most recent.
Click here for an archive of our sermons.
Feel free to use what is helpful from these sermons. We only ask that when substantial portions are abstracted or used in a written work, please credit Seekers Church and the author, and cite the URL.
“Bring Many Names” by Margreta Silverstone
March 15, 2020
The Third Sunday in Lent
Good morning. As you may recall, Eyes to See Ears to Hear Peace Prayer Mission Group has been in conversation with Celebration Circle for the past year about our naming of God within corporate worship. As part of that conversation, the mission group agreed to provide a series of sermons. This also follows on the Epiphany series of sermons that introduced you to the call and focus of the various mission groups within Seekers.
As a side note and given we are not meeting in person after this Sunday for a while, I encourage you to take the liturgy and the bulletin cover home. The inside has Peter’s many names for God. I used a random number generator to pick between 1 and 101 for each column and found different names. You will hear the results of this in what I share today.
We, as a faith community, benefit from the shared leadership that is embodied within mission groups. We benefit from Time & Space for the ongoing use and maintenance of this building. We benefit from Celebration Circle for their thoughtfulness in organizing our corporate worship. We benefit from Learners & Teachers for the weekly School for Christian Growth. And, we benefit from the Eyes to See, Ears to Hear peace prayer mission group with the Peace and Justice prayer that allows us to move from the gathering downstairs to the journey and gathering here. We, as a faith community, rely on this corporate body to strengthen and encourage our individual faith journeys. As we face into the new challenge of our community’s corporate health, we may need to learn new patterns of how to rely on each other in the days ahead.
“The Magnanimity of God” by Sandra Miller
March 8, 2020
The Second Sunday in Lent
Let us pray that the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be of value to you, Holy One, ground of our being who opens the path to our personal and communal salvation. Amen
As you all know, I was unable to preach last Sunday. I would like to offer my public thanks to Pat for exchanging Sundays with me, and for how gracefully Celebration Circle shifted liturgists and roles to accommodate my illness. I had been entrusted by my mission group to offer an introduction to the cycle of 4 distinctly personal reflections by members of Eyes to See, Ears to Hear Peace Prayer Mission Group on the sensitive topic of how we name and understand God, and I would like to convey now some of what I prepared.
“Naming God” by Pat Conover
March 1, 2020
The First Sunday in Lent
Sandra was scheduled to preach this morning but is not well. I was scheduled to preach next Sunday and Sandra will take that slot. This sermon references the lectionary for next Sunday, particularly the famous John 3:16 scripture.
The first four sermons of March will be given by members of the Eyes to See mission group. The sermons grew out of our shared prayer time and conversations regarding the justice issues involved in naming God with masculine references. We had a mutually supportive conversation with Celebration Circle as part of our process. Our conversations deepened as we put our justice concerns in theological perspectives. We became aware that talking about God with gender references was part of the larger question of whether or not it is helpful to talk about God as if God is a human person.
“How the Light Gets In” by Jacqueline Wallen
from catacomb of St Priscilla (Rome)
February 23, 2020
Transfiguration
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
I love that line from the Leonard Cohen song we heard at the beginning of worship. There is a crack in everything and, if we catch it just right, we can see the light of the Divine shine through. That is because the Divine is in everything. And everything is the Divine. That’s what we are learning in Glenn and Kolya’s current School for Christian Growth class on Richard Rohr’s book, The Universal Christ. To me, this picture of a rainbow, taken from my living room window, represents a crack that lets the Divine Light shine through.
“Living Water for Our Creativity” by Cynthia Dahlin
from catacomb of St Priscilla (Rome)
February 16, 2020
The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany
This sermon starts with time travel. I liked last week’s lectionary better than this weeks, and Bokamoso sang and demonstrated it, but did not speak on it. So we are going back a week. “You are the salt of the Earth; but if the salt has lost its taste, how can saltiness be restored? “ This sermon is a shaggy dog story which will get back to this passage from Matthew after a detour through Palestine, Amsterdam, Palestine again and Australia. “You are the salt of the Earth; but if the salt has lost its taste, how can saltiness be restored?”
What does Banksy, the stencil peace and justice street artist have to do with the call of the Living Water mission group here at Seekers? Here we go!