Sermons

When a man asks Jesus how to inherit eternal life, the answer turns his attention away from his possessions and toward his neighbors. On the Feast of St. Francis, this sermon asks what a church that has been given much is called to do with it.

When authority is real, it never needs to seize control to prove itself. This sermon looks at what it means to trust a power that moves through relationship and love rather than force.

Instead of a sermon, this Sunday brought a conversation: two pastors answering the questions you wrote down, from nostalgia and politics to what they talk about when no one is listening. Rooted in Ecclesiastes 3, it asks what season this 162-year-old church is in now, and what dream should carry it forward.

The crossing of the sea has always been told as proof that God rides into battle for one nation against another. This sermon asks what happens when we stop claiming God for our side and start asking whether we are on God’s.

There was no postal service in the ancient world, so Paul’s letter to the Romans traveled in the hands of a woman named Phoebe, who carried it, read it aloud, and interpreted it for the churches of Rome. Romans 16 turns out to be a roll call of the women whose labor and courage held the early church together.

A grocery list is never only a grocery list, and Paul’s lists were never only rules. This sermon follows Romans 12 into the question of how a community chooses to live together, and what our plans leave room for.

Paul wrote to the Romans as a stranger offering advice nobody asked for, addressing two groups who could not get along. What he gave them was not a verdict but a metaphor: a body, where every part matters and no part is the whole.

When the brothers who betrayed him walked through his door, Joseph asked about his father before he said anything about revenge. This sermon follows that instinct into our own conflicts, and asks what becomes possible when the shared work matters more than winning the argument.

Jacob spent a night grappling with a stranger who may have been an angel, or God, and walked away wounded, blessed, and renamed for the struggle. This sermon makes the case that questioning God is not a failure of faith but a form of it.

What if your church’s mission was simply that no one leaves the way they came? This sermon offers four practices for a church that stops competing and starts being community.