Sermons

January 29, 2017

Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Micah 61-8.     1 Corinthians 1:18-31          Matthew 5 1-12

[Scripture is quoted from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Permanent Text Edition® (2016). Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.]

So it’s 2017 and we look ahead to the New Year. Now’s a time when many of us think about expectations and plans. One of my seminary professors used to constantly ask in his Ethics class, “How would we view this issue from the perspective of the afterlife?” So what is important for you and for me in 2017, from the perspective of the afterlife?   If we could view our lives this year from a perspective of 20, 40, or 100 years from now, what is actually important?   (Ponder that question for a minute)

January 22, 2017

Third Sunday after Epiphany

Today the young people from Bokamoso again joined us, bringing us songs and stories from their lives in Winterveld, South Africa. 

There is no text, but only our joyous memories of their visit and our anticipation of their return next year.

January 15, 2017

Second Sunday after Epiphany

On the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s birth, Larry shared a reflection on King as prophet and servant. He noted that two-thirds of Americans alive today had not been born when King was assassinated in 1968, emphasizing the importance of remembering and celebrating MLK’s life and teaching.The full text is not available.

January 8, 2017

Epiphany

[Lisa Sharon Harper spoke without a text, but she has graciously offered the following blog post as a way of highlighting her major themes.]

More than ten years ago, I took a pilgrimage that changed my life.

At its conclusion, I found myself with one haunting question: If I were to share my understanding of the gospel to my ancestors who walked the Cherokee Trail of Tears (according to family oral tradition) and slaved in South Carolina and Virginia (according to Census Slave Schedules), would they receive my simple understanding of Jesus’ “good news” as good news? Would they jump for joy to find out “God has a wonderful plan for their lives, but they are sinful and therefore separated from God, but Jesus died for their sin, so if they pray a simple prayer they get to go to heaven?”

If this news would not lead my oppressed ancestors to shout with joy, then maybe it’s not good news at all — or at least it’s not good enough.

January 1, 2017

New Year’s Day

Revelation 21:1-6a

Matthew 25:31-46

When I agreed to preach this Sunday, I had expected us to be working with the lections for the Sunday after Christmas. I realized only ten days ago that Celebration Circle, indeed, “my” mission group, had decided to use the lections for New Year’s Day as the biblical basis and our service this morning.

New Year’s Day, as a holiday, seems to me to be lacking in Biblical grounding. It is one of those secular holidays, like Thanksgiving, which, because it has some spiritual connection, has been imported into the church calendar. At Seekers, we only celebrate it when it falls on a Sunday, and sometimes not even then, so today is a somewhat special occasion in that regard.

Another qualification on the New Year’s holiday is the arbitrary basis of its dating, a problem it shares with most of the rest of our calendar, which, as you may know, was designed by a sixth century CE monk named Dionysius Exigus, or Dennis the Small, or, in a more current idiom, “Little Denny.”. His lack of physical stature is unrelated to the historical significance of his work. As a consequence of his efforts to correctly date Easter, Dionysius put together a system for numbering years which is used worldwide today and which includes January 1 as the beginning of each of them.