Edna Lashon tells the story of visiting with a friend of hers whose husband had died. They went out the graveyard where the husband had been buried and they began to share together memories of their life and their relationship it was a meaningful time as they probed in memory and got in touch with all the joyful times of their life. But then there was silence. No one seemed to have anything else to say. All of a sudden, Liz the little daughter of Edna Lashon’s friend, sprang from the group and suddenly ...
Most of you here today would know the name Lloyd C. Douglas, the author of The Robe and Ben Hur. Mr. Douglas shares an experience out of his early life when he was a student at the university. He lived in a boarding house, and on the first floor below him, lived an old man who was a retired music teacher. The fella was infirm and was no longer able to walk. And Lloyd C. Douglas said that each day they would share a ritual together. He would come down the stairway and knock on the music teacher’s door and ...
There was a young musician whose first major concert was poorly received by the critics. The famous Finish composer Jean Sibelius, happened to be a friend of this young man and consoled him by patting him on the shoulder and saying, "Remember, son, there is no city in the world where they have erected a statue to a critic." (1) We've talked about how Every Day God Empowers Us, Equips Us and Enables Us. Today we're going to talk about how Every Day God Encourages us. Like that young musician who Sibelius ...
Like most pastors I’m always looking for ways to improve our church. Recently I ran across a list by Pastor Grant MacDonald of what he calls the “Top Ten Ways to Promote Growth in Your Church.” These suggestions are offered with tongue firmly planted in cheek, but I thought you might enjoy some of them. These are ways we might grow our church: Offer free frequent flyer miles with every visit! Use “Big Gulp” communion cups! Issue “Get Out of Hell Free” cards! Or how about this one? reclining pews! Every ...
When our Lord wanted to drive home a truth, he told a story. There were 99 sheep safe in the fold, but the good shepherd went searching for the one that was lost. A woman had 10 precious coins. She lost one of them. A certain man had two sons. The Bible never gets better than here in Luke 15. The thread that binds these stories together is the single word celebration. (Luke 15: 23-24) “Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found. So they began to ...
I'm dating myself here, but how many of you remember Speedy Alka-Seltzer or the Alka-Seltzer commercials. Now we have all kinds of antacid commercials and products. It seems Americans are consumed with heartburn. It might be the huge portions we eat. But whatever the case we probably have more acid indigestion than any other country in the world. As a result we have Tums, Rolaids, Maalox, Pepcid, Tagamet, Zantac, Prilosec and my favorite Nexium. And those are only the ones I've seen. For years, all I ever ...
A certain society matron took a course in First Aid. A few days after completing the course, she was an on-the-spot witness of a bad auto accident. Occupants of the car were thrown out by the impact and lay seriously wounded on the street. Later, describing the accident to a friend, the matron said, “It was awful, awful — and it happened so fast, right there in front of me. Tires squealed, breaks screeched, and all of a sudden there was the grinding crash. The next thing I knew people were lying in the ...
It was in the newspaper back in the late 1950’s, at the height of the civil rights movement - an unforgettable picture which captured not only the emotion of one man, but the deep sense of freedom and joy and release and affirmation of a whole people. A black man, who must have been over 100 years old, was being carried on the shoulders of a group of young men. They were taking him up the steps of a courthouse in a Southern town to register to vote. The caption beneath the picture said he was born a slave ...
It would take very little personal conversation among us this morning to discover the healing, encouraging, strengthening, supporting, comforting power the Psalms have been in our individual lives. A variety and a large number of Psalms would be pointed to as the ones that have ministered to you in a particular time of need. At our Administrative Board meeting two weeks ago, Karla Grant shared her Christian pilgrimage verses from the Psalms. This is her story. Six weeks after she and Don welcomed their ...
Surprise! Surprise! Life is full of surprises! Some surprises are awesome. Someone will get an engagement ring for Christmas. Some surprises are awful. As long as we live, will we ever forget those exploding Twin Towers? Some surprises are a combination of awesome and awful. A parishioner called her pastor and said, “I need a little help. My father just won a 30 million dollar lottery. He is 96 years old, has heart trouble and I am concerned if I tell him, he will have a heart attack. Would you mind paying ...
I’ve always been fond of the story of the two men in a boat in the midst of a severe storm. As the waves rose and the boat threatened to capsize, the men knew that they needed help. They were not religious men, but they decided that prayer was all that was left, so there in the teeth of the gale, one of them shouted the only prayer he could muster, “O God, you know that I haven’t bothered you for the past 15 years, and if you’ll just get us out of this mess, I promise you that I won’t bother you again for ...
Now that Matthew has finished his genealogy, he starts his narrative. We would not have much of a Bible without the narratives, but sometimes the biblical authors frustrate us. We always want more details. We want to know where the characters come from, what happens to them as they walk off stage. Just as we are starting to identify with a character, she will disappear, never to return. Matthew is no different. Right in his second sentence, he does the thing that frustrates us. He presents a scene that ...
Fido is in the dirt gnawing on a bone. It is dry, brittle, depleted of marrow and moisture. It is dead and useless except for stimulating the gums of Fido and giving his jaws some exercise. You approach Fido with your hands behind your back. Fido eyes you and is suspicious. You speak kindly to your canine friend. He wags his tail. He smiles his doggy smile keeping his paw firmly planted on the bone. Fido continues to sniff and chew on his bone. You slowly bring a hand out from behind your back revealing a ...
A father was sitting on the floor with his three boys getting ready for bedtime prayers. The two older boys were having an argument about their action figures. The issue was whether Superman was better than He-Man. One boy said that Superman could fly, the other countered that He-Man had bigger muscles. And so it went, back and forth, while the youngest boy, Nicholas age four, just watched. Dad turned to Nick and asked: "So who's your hero, Nick?" Without batting an eye, Nick tilted his head, gave Dad one ...
Our theme for this third Sunday in Advent is music. “When the Messiah comes there will be singing.” I think most of us love the music of Christmas. Of course, I realize that not all of us are musicians. A man and his wife were browsing in a crafts store one day when the man noticed a display of country-style musical instruments. After looking over the flutes, dulcimers and recorders, he picked up a shiny, one-stringed instrument he took to be a mouth harp. He put it to his lips and, much to the amusement ...
Many years ago, a missionary society wrote to David Livingstone, a Scottish Presbyterian pioneer medical missionary in Central Africa, and asked, "Have you found a good road to where you are? If so, we want to send other men to join you." Livingstone wrote back, "If you have men who will come only because there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all." Every ministry and every ministry leader in the history of the Christian faith has faced tough times. Usually ...
When someone says, "I love you," the natural reply is, "I love you, too." If you're in a loving relationship with someone, you expect those words in response. Our passage from 1 John today tells us that this is the kind of relationship God has with us. It's not just about saying the words, though. We heard John telling us last week: "Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action" (1 John 3:18). This week he says it like this: "We love because God first loved us" (1 John 4:19 ...
Mike Rowe has made a career out of doing disgusting stuff. As the host of the Discovery Channel series “Dirty Jobs,” Rowe has mucked-out, dug under, flushed, slogged, and slid through some of the most filthy and foul places on the planet. But whether he has been hanging from rafters or slipping through sewers, Rowe has consistently shown his viewers how even the most grungy, grimy, gross job still has its own dirty dignity. Rowe always offers respect to those who are “showing him the ropes,” whether they ...
Mike Rowe has made a career out of doing disgusting stuff. As the host of the Discovery Channel series “Dirty Jobs,” Rowe would muck-out, dig under, flush, slog, and slide through some of the most filthy and foul places on the planet. But whether he has been hanging from rafters or slipping through sewers, Rowe consistently showed his viewers how even the most grungy, grimy, gross job still has its own dirty dignity. Rowe always offered respect to those who were “showing him the ropes,” whether they were ...
1120. Holiness Shining through Humanity
Mark 9:2-9
Illustration
Scott Hoezee
Frederick Buechner muses on the Transfiguration this way: In the Transfiguration it was the holiness of Jesus shining through his humanness, his face so afire with it that they were almost blinded. Even with us something like that happens once in a while. The face of a man walking his child in the park, of a woman picking peas in the garden, of sometimes even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, say, or standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just having a beer at a Saturday ...
Some of you will remember country comedian Jerry Clower. Besides being a funny story-teller, Clower, who died in 1998, was a deeply religious man. He tells of an occasion when he invited Sue, his 14-year-old daughter, and one of her friends to go with him on a trip to the Country Music Awards show in Hollywood. He listed for Sue some of the celebrities she would meet if she went, some of the best-known entertainers at that time. Sue’s response? She said, “Daddy, I love you and I’m so glad that you would ...
Malachi 3:1-4, Luke 1:68-79, Luke 3:1-20, Philippians 1:3-11
Bulletin Aid
Julia Ross Strope
Call To Worship (Includes the lighting of the Advent Wreath) Leader: Already, the year is behind us and we are counting the days until Christmas — the eldering for one set of reasons and the young for another. We’ve come here to enjoy the festivities of December and to tell again the stories that encourage us to be God-bearers in our world. People: The scriptures say that God has made promises of safety and prosperity to people who are willing to be loyal bearers of goodness and grace, mercy and ...
"Students, it is time to get out your pencils, close your books and remove any notes from your desks. The test is about to begin." Those are words that make us shudder, our hearts start to pound and the palms of our hands begin to sweat. From our earliest days in school, we all have had to learn to deal with tests. It may begin with a simple first grade spelling test. But it doesn't take too long before it morphs into ISTEP, the SAT, the Bar, the Boards, or a doctoral qualifying exam. Or it might be as ...
Many years ago when I was going to prep school in Milwaukee, the students loved to walk past a nearby factory from which often emanated some simply wonderful smells. The factory made a product whose name seemed to perfectly fit the heavenly aromas that would occasionally fill the atmosphere of the neighborhood. The factory made Ambrosia Chocolate! For a chocolate lover like myself, there could be no better name for such a delectable food. You see, in ancient Greek mythology ambrosia was the name of the ...
I heard it again at a meeting last week ... a comment about the length of the worship service. Somewhere along the way, people in our Christian tradition came up with the idea that worship should last about no more than sixty minutes. The comment was innocent enough and was being made in reference to recommendations our ministry team would be making regarding the Sunday morning schedule of worship and learning. How much time should there be between the close of the first worship service and the learning ...