Sermon and Worship Resources

Showing 1701 to 1725 of 5000 results

Mark 12:38-44

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... we are useful, successful, or essential to a project or institution. We are worthy of God’s grace and place in a community of faith no matter who we are or what we are capable of doing, because our worth is not measured but intrinsic to who we are, marked and made in the image of God. This sense of “value” should have been a no brainer to those of the Jewish faith, given the messages of the Hebrew scriptures, but at the time Jesus was living and teaching, the message had gotten lost, at least lost to ...

1702. A New Beginning

2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Sermon

Mark Ellingsen

... for us to confess our sin and disbelief and to confess how we have squandered all the new opportunities Jesus has given us. We have missed how God has changed us. This word was at the heart of Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom of God coming near (Mark 1:5 — a text that most historians agree is one of the most ancient, historically accurate accounts of Jesus’ preaching and teaching). Repent and believe that the new has come and that the past no longer holds us in chains. This message is evident in our ...

1703. Stop in the Name of Love

Matthew 3:13-17

Sermon

King Duncan & Angela Akers

... bridge that will last forever between us and receiving the fullness of God. Pastor Ben Helmer tells of a 55-year-old man who began attending an Episcopal church. Not long afterwards, the man asked, “What do I have to do to be baptized?” His baptism marked a decisive change in this man’s life, both inwardly and outwardly. He had spent his life as a professional counselor, but he shared that it was only after his baptism that he found the wholeness, the fullness of peace and assurance, that he had tried ...

1704. A Life-changing Question

John 9:1-41

Sermon

King Duncan & Angela Akers

... unwanted attention. Don’t you think he asked that question hundreds of times throughout his life? He is never even mentioned by name in our Bible story. Others only refer to him as a blind man, a beggar. In this community, that was his whole identity. And it marked him as being separated from God. He spent his life begging for mercy from humans. Did he dare expect any mercy from God? I would guess he spent his whole life asking, “Why do I have to suffer? Why did God let this happen to me?” Pastor ...

1705. The Trust of Simon Cephas

John 1:29-42

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... community, activity, and life built around a singular purpose, history, metaphor, or meaning. The entire idea of a cornerstone is to create a building upon it which will represent some kind of importance to its community. It will be a gathering place, a place marked with a mission which foundation signals its founding. In the case of Jesus, Son of God, Founder of the Universe, a Temple was built. Not any Temple, but a spiritual Temple, of which he is the cornerstone. He gives it purpose, meaning, and method ...

1706. When Darkness Covered the Land

Matthew 27:11-54

Sermon

King Duncan & Angela Akers

... a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).” Theologian R.T. France points out that this cry of anguish from the cross marked the only time in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark or Luke that Jesus ever addressed God without calling him “Father.” (2) That certainly marks the depth of his despair. But don’t you imagine that, when he uttered these words, Jesus knew exactly what he was doing? After all, he was quoting from Psalm 22, a messianic ...

1707. Seeing is Believing…or Is It?

John 20:19-31

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... a week later? Would he have witnessed what he did? Could he have been the apostle he later would become? Or did his mind, even a mind that focused on the practical and empirical, do a “double take” when he felt with his own hands the nail marks and wounds of Jesus? That was enough to not only confirm perhaps what he believed or hoped, but to change his inner vision to one accepting of supernatural truth. You see, here is the one “paradox” about believing and seeing. Once in a while, we can encounter ...

1708. Framed by Love

John 14:15-21

Sermon

April Yamasaki

... your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 19:18). Earlier in Jesus’ own ministry, when a lawyer asked him about the greatest commandment, Jesus spoke of loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:34- 40; Mark 12:28-31, Luke 10:25-28). So when Jesus told his disciples to love one another, he was hardly telling them anything new. Instead, he gave them a very old and very familiar commandment. They had heard it before and could probably say if off ...

1709. Love In Action

Mark 10:17-31

Sermon

Will Willimon

... for rationality and weaseling out of the "sell all you have, and give it to the poor." But the thing that strikes me is Mark's editorial comment; not found in the other evangelists' treatment of this tale: "And Jesus loved him." He loved him. Does that seem strange ... love," said Niebuhr. Justice is more practical than love. Niebuhr suggested, that love is the problem, not the answer. And yet Mark says that Jesus spoke an unpleasant word to the Rich Young Man because he loved him. I fear that I (and ...

1710. A Violent Week

Mark 14:1-2 · Luke 22:14-23:56

Sermon

Will Willimon

... , we're apt to think of it as an injustice, a tragedy, but do we also think of it as violent? "The chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him...and kill him...." They did kill him in a particularly despicable, painful, violent way. Behind Mark's terse account is a horrible scene, if we had the imagination to picture it -- of a man being beaten, spat upon, hands nailed to wood, side pierced with sword, and hung up to bleed and suffocate in utter agony. The next time that someone says to you ...

1711. You've Got Spirit

Luke 3:15-22 · Acts 8:14-17 · Psalm 29 · Isaiah 61:1-4

Sermon

Will Willimon

... to the afflicted,...to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives" (Isaiah 61:1). Power. Fire. Spirit. He had been born and bred, as they say, in North Carolina. Natural for him were two water fountains in stores, one marked "Colored," the other marked "White." The other people never had last names, only "Sam," or "Mary," "Sadie," or worse, ''Buck," "Uncle," "Boy," "Girl." They never entered by the front door, sat only at the back of the bus, drank only from mayonnaise jars when they ...

1712. Let's Go Fishing

Mark 1:14-20

Sermon

David E. Leininger

... warden?” the old-timer inquired. “Yup.” Unruffled, the old man began to move the fishing pole from side to side. Finally, he lifted the line out of the water. Pointing to a minnow wriggling on the end of the line, he said, “Just teaching him how to swim.”[1] Mark Twain once spent a pleasant three weeks in the Maine woods but as he was now on his way home, making himself comfortable in the train on the way back to New York, a sour-faced New Englander sat down next to him, and the two struck up a ...

1713. The View From The Mountaintop

Mark 9:2-9

Sermon

David E. Leininger

... valley. The mountaintop experiences are wonderful when they come, but the world where most of us live (and where Abraham Lincoln lived) is the one that hears the loving Dad of an epileptic child at the end of his rope say, “I believe; help my unbelief! (Mark 9:24)” and we whisper Amen. Lincoln once said, “I have often wished that I was a more devout man than I am. Nevertheless, amid the greatest difficulties of my administration, when I could not see any other resort, I would place my whole reliance ...

1714. “I Will Sing the Lord’s Praise, for He Has Been Good to Me”

Psalm 13:1-6

Teach the Text

C. Hassell Bullock

... with his enemies, foreign and domestic. Kidner astutely observes that the two poles of David’s psalms are God and David’s enemies.6 Twice in Psalm 13:4 David mentions his enemy and his foes. Yet, while David’s love for his children was a mark of his character, his indulgent attitude toward them sometimes had ill results. One could say that the sorrow of Absalom’s rebellion always lurked in David’s soul and was never far below the surface. Psalm 13 does not exhibit the weaponry and brutality of ...

1715. Judgment on Israel

Amos 2:6-16

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... and silenced the prophets, verse 12. Nazirites, two of whom are named in the OT (Samuel, 1 Sam.1:28; Samson, Judg. 13–15), were those set apart by special vows for service exclusively to the Lord. As a mark of separation, they vowed not to cut their hair; as a mark of self-denial, they abstained from wine; and as a mark of purity, they did not go near the dead (Num. 6:1–21). They thus bore witness to Israel’s early life in the desert when it swore sole allegiance to the person and ways of its God at ...

1716. Blessings for a Defiled People

Haggai 2:10-19

Understanding Series

John Goldingay

... 15a), but in the context this expression more likely explicates the significance of “this day,” whose three prophecies in 2:10–23 mark it to be particularly significant. So the laying of one stone on another, which is also the temple’s founding (v. 18), ... such as the fetching of timber and the clearing of debris, and to think of the 24th day of the ninth month as marking the ceremonial beginning of the restoration proper. It is thus a significant day and one that illuminates and is illuminated by the ...

1717. Zerubbabel the Lord’s Signet Ring

Haggai 2:20-23

Understanding Series

John Goldingay

... , and they are quite different from each other—though both actually do relate to the rebuilding and motivate it. 2:20–23 The book closes with a further twofold promise from this same day, though it has a semi-separate chronological introduction to mark the fact that it has a different specific concern from verses 10–19. Those earlier verses began with priestly matters; this subsection wholly concerns the governor. It makes no actual reference to the temple, though its context and its belonging to this ...

1718. Haunted

Mark 6:14-29

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... of guilt, unrepentant guilt. One of my favorite childhood stories is the story of the “Teeny Tiny Woman.” Does anyone remember that story? It’s an English folk tale, origin unknown, a creepy little tale, and it goes like this (for the quotation marks below, get the congregation to repeat “teeny tiny”): As you might imagine, everything in the story is “teeny tiny.” So a teeny tiny woman goes from her “ “ house to a “ “ graveyard and finds a “ “ bone that she decides to use to make ...

1719. Bread and Call

John 6:35, 41-51

Sermon

David Coffin

... he then say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” John 6:42 (RSV). Luke’s gospel provides the only account of Jesus’ childhood at age twelve. Most scholars believe that John had access to the same sources that Mark had about Jesus. In Mark 6:1-6, Jesus was identified as the “carpenter, the son of Mary” Mark 6:3 (RSV). He was a tradesman or skilled worker, not trained temple rabbi. He was not groomed for seminary. Using bread as a metaphor, Jesus affirmed he was the word made flesh stated in John 1 ...

1720. Baptized in Water

Mark 10:35-45, Psalm 104:1-35

Sermon

Thomas C. Willadsen

... whenever a family presents a child to be baptized, or when an older person asks to be baptized. Is it the kind that Jesus talked about in response to James and John, in which one is overwhelmed by the chaotic power of a flood? Or is it a baptism that marks a turning point in one’s life, a washing, a cleansing? In our tradition it is both — we hold up water’s power to destroy and its power to cleanse. We hold up the fact that water is essential for life on earth but also can be perilous and destructive ...

1721. Night and Light

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Sermon

Wayne Brouwer

... of Jesus girded everything. This is why the foot washings took place. The dust of the old expressions of God’s activity with these folks was being washed away so that they might travel with Jesus into the new age. And the badge that would mark them would no longer be circumcision but rather a visible expression of love. A World Waiting To Be Born Nevertheless, this intimate gathering of Jesus with his disciples takes place on a very dark night. C. S. Lewis captured well the biblical tension between light ...

1722. Going Home ― Part Two: Then And Now

Luke 4:21-30

Sermon

John B. Jamison

... said about what happened that day and see if we can hear it. Luke said, “But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.” Matthew said, “And they took offense at him and he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief. Mark said, “And he could do no deed of power there, except he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.” Did you hear the difference there? Luke said that when the people reacted as they did, Jesus just ...

1723. Behold, the One Who Betrays Me Is With Me

Luke 22:14-34

Sermon

Will Willimon

... hand of him who betrays me is on the table.” And all lifted their hands off the table. Who could do this? You know the answer. An argument arose among the disciples “as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest” (22:24). Mark puts this dispute over greatness elsewhere, when Jesus and his disciples are on the road one day. Luke, with his typical dramatic genius, places it here, at the table, just after Jesus has predicted that one of his own will betray him. “When the campaign is over ...

1724. Spirit Struck

Acts 2:1-21 · John 14:8-17, 25-27

Sermon

Lori Wagner

... of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:20-23) From stone to heart. From “original covenant” to “new covenant.” From living by the Mosaic “law” to living stones built upon the foundation of Jesus, Messiah, Son of God. June 1st marked an important holiday in the Jewish calendar –Shavuot, otherwise known as the Feast of Weeks. We know it as Pentecost, the holiday we celebrate together as Christians today on June 8th! No matter which tradition you ascribe to, Pentecost is a hugely ...

1725. As a Fire Exists by Burning

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

... and pronounced them delicious. But, you ask, what does that have to do with today’s lesson from Luke’s gospel? Company’s Comin’ There are some New Testament scholars who insist that we can’t possibly understand the full meaning of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) unless we study them in the context of the first Jewish War that took place from 66-73 CE. I concur. This is a sermon, not a history lecture, so I’ll try to keep the contextualizing short, but please do not equate brevity ...

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