Mary’s Predicament and Joseph’s Dilemma: The Conception of Jesus

So as I mentioned at the beginning of the service, today is the first Sunday of Advent. Now don’t let Advent calendars mislead you, Advent doesn’t start on December 1st, it actually starts 4 Sundays before Christmas and ends on Christmas Eve. Advent is a season of anticipation and preparation. We tell stories of those [...]

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Preparedness: The Parable of the 10 Bridesmaids

Let us Pray – Dear Lord – bless the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts – grow in us and show us your ways and inspire us to live by your truth.  Amen Today’s sermon is going to be slightly shorter than my usual. I’ve been fighting a cold all week [...]

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The Greatest Commandment: Love

A while back my brother decided he was going to get a new tattoo. He had read this phrase in a book that resonated with him and he wanted to get it permanently inked on his body. My other brother and I (I have 2 brothers) thought it was pretty cool, so we all agreed [...]

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The Unfairness of Grace

Verses This morning I want to look at two different stories that don’t really fit into the concept we have defined as fairness. Fairness is a human construct that isn’t of God, and as we’ll see from these stories, it isn’t necessarily something that is important to God. Last week I read the parable of [...]

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Jo’s Sermon on dealing with conflict in church

As a parent of a toddler, I have lately found myself sort of consumed by thoughts of discipline, in the sense of, holy heck what am I supposed to do to make sure my child does not grow up to be a jerk? Will saying “please be gentle with your sister” work when I say [...]

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Getting better at this preaching thing

Today I preached the final sermon of a three week series I did on issues surrounding faith. Three weeks in a row, the first time I’ve ever done that. I just started preaching last December, when I preached my first sermon the third Sunday of Advent. Now, 8 months later, I have preached 7 times. [...]

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My 7th Sermon – Faith

For the last few weeks I have been talking about issues surrounding faith. I built a 3 week series on Faith structured around the Gospel Lectionary readings. In the church calendar we are in the period following Pentecost known as Ordinary Time. There are no big feast days or celebrations, but it is a time [...]

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My 6th Sermon – Persistent Faith

Here is the audio from the sermon: Doubt and Faith Last week I was blessed to bring you God’s Word, and started the first in a three-part series on faith. Last week’s sermon was on doubt. I talked about how doubt does not need to carry all the negative connotations that are often associated with [...]

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My 5th Sermon – Doubt

Here is the audio from this weeks sermon: Doubt and Faith As I was reading through the lectionary readings for this week, I was struck by Jesus’ words to Peter in the story we just heard, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” Crossing the sea in the midst of a wild storm, the [...]

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My Wife’s Sermon

This week I was supposed to write a sermon on the new vision statement for our church, “Being disciples to impact the world with God’s love.” I was really struggling with it, and yesterday asked my wife to give me a hand (because she’s good at these sorts of things). So she basically sat down [...]

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