Sermon and Worship Resources

Showing 1 to 25 of 27 results

Mark 4:35-41

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

In his book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, rabbi and psychologist, Edwin Friedman, defines the effective leader as the person who is able to maintain a “non-anxious presence” in an anxious system. He goes on to say that all systems (organizations) are, by nature, anxious. Families are anxious. Corporations are anxious. Baseball teams are anxious. Boards of directors ...

2. Blessed

Matthew 5:1-12

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

We hear it all the time. We hear it in church, in interviews with sports and movie stars, and we hear it a whole lot around the Fourth of July. “I’ve been blessed.” “We’ve been so blessed.” But what does it mean? What does it mean to be blessed? Usually we associate it with plentitude. It means that we have a lot of something: money, property, talent. Certainly, in that sense things haven’t chan...

3. Desperation to Hope

Mark 5:21-43

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

Roland Jaffe’s brilliant and beautiful film, “The Mission” (1986) tells the true story of the Spanish Jesuit missionaries who served the indigenous (Indian) populations of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay during the first half of the eighteenth century. The “Jesuit Reductions,” as history has dubbed them, were mission stations created by the Jesuits to bring Christianity to the natives through edu...

4. Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

Matthew 17:1-13

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

The Cadillac ELR commercial that was made for and launched during the 2014 Winter Olympics, was called “Poolside.” It featured actor, Neil McDonough, blond, handsome, and cocksure, touting not so much the car as the people who made it and, more importantly, the people who can afford to buy it. In fact, if you don’t watch carefully you don’t even know it’s about a car. It was about hard driving, in...

5. Grace Upon Grace

John 1:1-18

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

Grace upon grace. What a lovely turn of phrase that is. The gospel writer, John, really knew his stuff, didn’t he? Now, if only we knew what it meant. What exactly is this grace of God that we hear so much about in the Christian community? Christian theologians have spent much of the last two thousand years trying to define it. Saint Augustine said that grace is the unmerited love and favor whic...

6. Less Fear; More Fruit

Matthew 3:1-12

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

“Be afraid. Be very afraid.” The year is 1986 and the movie is the remake of the classic horror film, “The Fly.” Jeff Goldbum plays the eccentric scientist, Seth Brundle, who is working on a machine that will teleport people and things by disassembling their molecules at one point and reassembling them at another. Geena Davis plays Veronica Quaife, a reporter who is writing Brundle’s story. Unf...

7. Like a Phoenix

Mark 6:1-13

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

Almost every culture has, in its foundational mythology, a Phoenix or firebird. The one with which we westerners are most familiar is the Greek Phoenix which, like all such mythological creatures, is said to die in a burst of sparks and fire only to be born anew from its own ashes. Because this mythological creature lives in a constant cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, the Phoenix is, in most ...

8. Little Start, Big Finish

Mark 4:26-34

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

The kingdom of God is a pretty big deal in the Bible. In the New Testament alone it is mentioned 72 times. In the gospels, it’s the subject Jesus talks about more than any other. (The second-place winner is money.) And yet, despite the fact that Jesus talks about it a great deal, we Christians tend to be rather unclear about what exactly is meant by this four word phrase: The kingdom of God. Th...

9. Living Bread

John 6:51-58

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

In my thirty years of ordained ministry and 50 years of church membership, I have discovered that there are five kinds of Christian: Free Riders, Fans, Friends, Followers and Fanatics. FREE RIDERS are Christians in name only. If you ask them, they will tell you that they believe in God and Jesus. They know how to answer the questions correctly. God is the creator of the universe. Jesus is the so...

10. Lost in Plain Sight

John 1:29-34, John 1:35-42

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

What are you looking for? What are you looking for? A seemingly innocent question, asked to elicit information. But when Jesus asks it, it becomes so much more. It becomes not just a question, but the question, the existential question that defines, to a large extent, exactly who we are. What are you looking for? Percy Harrison Fawcett was looking for El Dorado. Not the city of gold, the city o...

11. Meet the Rose Family

Mark 3:20-35

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

We begin this morning with a brief review of something most of us learned in ninth grade biology and then promptly forgot as soon as the test was over, and that is how science organizes and classifies living things. Maybe these layers of classification will ring a bell: Kingdom Phylum Class Series Family Genus Species Remember? No? Okay, well, now you know. This is how science organizes all l...

12. Meeting Jesus

John 3:1-17

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

My friend, Phil, had his vision checked regularly when he was a kid, just like most of us Baby Boomers did. The vision tester would come to the elementary school every year and everyone would go to the nurse’s office and read the eye charts. Then he went to junior high and high school and they didn’t test his vision any more. He went to college and graduated and started his career, got married, h...

13. Metaphors Be with You

John 6:35, 41-51

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

His name was John Davis, he was my neighbor, and he was a peculiar person. Don’t get me wrong. I liked him but even his wife said John was an “acquired taste.” I sometimes think that, had he been born thirty or forty years later, he would have been correctly diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome or some other condition associated with the higher functioning end of the Autism spectrum. He was a ...

14. Missional Discontinuity

Mark 6:30-44, Mark 6:45-56

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

What is it with Americans and work? We work, on average, 1,836 hours a year, more than just about anyone else in the industrialized world, and we take less vacation. 42% of working Americans don’t take any vacation at all and, of those who do, 61% report that they were working when they should have been playing!1 Paid time off makes up, on average, 7% of an American workers’ compensation package...

15. More Than Enough

John 6:1-21

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

Forty percent of all the food that is produced in the United States is thrown away. That’s about twenty pounds per person per month, a total of about 33 million tons or $165 billion worth of edible, nutritious food per year. Discarded food is the second highest component of landfills in this country that as it decays, becomes a significant contributor to methane emissions.1 Worldwide, western, i...

16. Never on Sunday

Mark 2:23-3:6

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

There are not ten commandments; there are only nine. That other one, the one about resting and not working on the Sabbath, that’s really just a suggestion. No one, not even the most observant Christians — with the possible exception of Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-a — take it all that seriously, and even they simply close their businesses. Whether or not they actually rest and remember, as the comma...

17. Now, It's Personal

Matthew 5:21-37

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

Thirty years ago I was serving on the staff of a large church as the minister of Christian Education and Youth Ministry. The Education Commission and the Youth Council were made up, mostly of parents who worked with me on the programs for youth and children — Sunday school, Vacation Bible School, those kinds of things. One year, for Vacation Bible School, we decided to set up a large tent — a rea...

18. Preparing the Way

Matthew 11:2-11

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

In 1992, Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida. It destroyed entire communities and killed 26 people, obliterated more than 25,000 homes, and damaged more than 100,000 others. I remember one news program was going through a residential area where it looked like every single home had been blown to smithereens by bombs. There, in the midst of all that devastation stood three houses. Each of the house...

19. Promises to Keep

Mark 6:14-29

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

The Days of Our Loves, Herod Style If you like those soap opera type stories of dysfunctional families or maybe royal palace intrigue, you need look no further than the New Testament, the histories of Josephus, and the lives of the Herod Family. Herod the Great was the patriarch of this particular and peculiar family and, as you may recall, he ruled Palestine from about 36 BCE to 4 BCE. History ...

20. Raison d’Etre

Matthew 5:13-16, Matthew 5:17-20

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent...” Most people think that it was Don Draper, the main character in the TV series, Mad Men, who first introduced and spoke of the idea of an indifferent universe, and he did, in fact, use that phrase. But he wasn’t the first. Others believe that the first was Carl Sagan, and he did say that “the uni...

21. Re-Gifted but not Returned

Matthew 3:13-17

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

A few years ago the New York Times city room editor, James Barron, asked readers to recall the worst Christmas gifts they had ever received. I thought I’d share a couple with you. I’d tell you the worst Christmas gift I ever got, but I don’t, to this day, know what it was. It was a secret Santa gift from someone at a company I do consulting work for. I can’t describe it. It was something like a p...

22. Same Ol’, Same Ol’

Matthew 2:13-18

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

Herod I or Herod the Great was born in 73 BCE, the son of Antipater the Idumaean, a high ranking court official. Through a series of intrigues and coups more complex than we have time to unravel, here, he was declared King of Judea by the Roman Senate in 37 BCE. He would rule as “King of the Jews” for about thirty years until his death in 4 BCE. Historically, he is remembered mostly for his buil...

23. Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!

Matthew 24:36-44

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

“Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” Many of us can still remember television’s Jim Nabors as Private Gomer Pyle, USMC, his eyes closed, a broad smile creasing his face, weaving his head and shoulders back and forth as he said that phrase. Surprises always pleased Gomer. He accepted them as gifts. Maybe that’s because Gomer was easy to surprise. He was naïve and rather simple. His heart was pure and ...

24. Surprised by Joy

Luke 2:8-14

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

The carol shouts “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!” In another the musicians are instructed to “play the oboe and bagpipes merrily.” In the little town of Bethlehem “we hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell.” The songs of Christmas are filled with “Hark!” and “Gloria!” and “Hallelujah!” The angels tell the shepherds to be not afraid because they are bringing “good news of great...

25. The Art of Following

Matthew 4:12-17, Matthew 4:18-22

Sermon

Dean Feldmeyer

If you’re my age or older you may remember Homer and Jethro. They were a comedy team who specialized in country music parodies and satire. They were sometimes referred to as “the thinking man’s hillbillies.” One of their routines went like this: HOMER: Jethro, if you was to win the Irish sweepstakes for two million dollars, would you give me half? JETHRO: Why, Homer, you’re my best and closest...

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