Sermon and Worship Resources

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1 Corinthians 3:1-9

Sermon

John N. Brittain

I once had a student whose dad was a pilot for a major airline who told me this true story. Her father flew DC-10s from St. Louis to the east coast. There were certain business people who took the same flights on a regular basis and, while certainly not friends, he recognized them enough to exchange pleasantries. One of these frequent travelers was visually impaired and used a guide dog. On one oc...

2. A Little Theology at Christmas

Titus 2:11-14

Sermon

John N. Brittain

Scholars who study such things are quick to tell anyone who will listen that Christmas is much overrated as a church festival. If you ask the average person (even the average churchgoer) what the most important Christian festivals are, they will probably answer "Christmas and Easter," and most likely in that order. But, the scholars will point out, they are not even close in theological significan...

3. All About Me?

Romans 1:16-17; 3:22b-31

Sermon

John N. Brittain

Since we all know that one of life's cardinal rules in the twenty-first century is that "it's all about me," I am sort of reluctant to admit this: The Bible is not all about me. Not that I am not there in plenty of places. I am there with Adam pointing the finger at Eve, trying to pass off the blame for my sin to someone else. I am there with Cain, feeling resentment toward someone who is obviousl...

4. Are We There Yet?

James 5:7-10

Sermon

John N. Brittain

"Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" It's not just children of a certain age who ask that question, although they certainly do. I've been on a number of trips in the past few years with delayed flights, missed connections, and lost luggage, where I've been the one asking the question. Leading up to Christmas (or a birthday or wedding or trip to Disney World) the question becomes one of time rathe...

5. "Ascribe To The Lord The Glory Due His Name ..."

Sermon

John N. Brittain

Psalm 96:8 Twenty years ago I was the young minister of children and youth at a large United Methodist church on the east coast. The semi-retired minister of visitation was the Reverend Walter Donoway, who was approaching his ninetieth birthday. He made regular hospital and home rounds and on Sunday mornings often said the prayer or received the offering. He had never been a tall man and was now s...

6. By Whose Standards?

1 Corinthians 4:1-5

Sermon

John N. Brittain

As the current century dawned, Time magazine placed Einstein on the front cover as the Person of the Century. By happenstance, Mohandas Gandhi was on the back cover as part of an advertisement for a computer company. I suppose that says something about our values. What is it that we really think is most important in life? In church we talk about the need for Christians to be "different," a chosen ...

7. Caught in the Middle

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

Sermon

John N. Brittain

It has become very popular to talk about how stressed out we are because we (both individually and collectively) are caught in the middle of too many demands and stretched too thin. For some years, we have heard about the "super-mom" syndrome of trying to juggle a full professional life with the many duties of motherhood. More recently, there is a lot of talk about the increasing time demands the ...

8. Dare to Be Different

Romans 13:11-14

Sermon

John N. Brittain

A true story tells how the two sons of a ninety-year-old Fort Worth, Texas, woman were worried about her safety. "We are going to get you a pistol, mother, so you can take care of yourself. There is too much violence out there." So they bought their mother a gun, which she dutifully packed in her purse. One day, when she left Ridgmar Shopping Center to get into her car she found two young men sitt...

9. Eighteen Years Is Long Enough

Jeremiah 1:1-19

Sermon

John N. Brittain

A few weeks ago the officers of Kappa Chi, our co-ed Christian service fraternity, had a planning retreat in a small town just east of Indianapolis. We took our Saturday afternoon Burger King and Taco Bell to a picturesque park where I spotted a little boy who looked to be about five years old. He was the spitting image of my son Tim as he looked eighteen years ago when he was five. A lot of water...

10. Fools For The Sake Of Christ

1 Corinthians 4:1-21

Sermon

John N. Brittain

April 9, 1996, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia delivered an address in Mississippi on religion and public life, a topic which has gotten a lot of attention the past few years, particularly since the publication of Stephen L. Carter's book The Culture of Disbelief. In the course of that speech Justice Scalia quoted from the apostle Paul's letter to the Corinthians where he says that we Christi...

11. Headed in the Right Direction

Romans 15:4-13

Sermon

John N. Brittain

If you don't know that Christmas is a couple of weeks away, you must be living underground. And you must have no contact with any children. And you cannot have been to a mall, Wal-Mart, Walgreen's, or any other chain store since three weeks before Halloween. Christmas, probably more than any other day in the contemporary American calendar, is one of those days where impact really stretches the env...

12. Hidden in Plain Sight

1 Corinthians 2:1-12 (13-16)

Sermon

John N. Brittain

I had a much-loved professor in seminary who confessed to some of us over coffee one day that he frequently came home from church and was so frustrated he had to go out and dig in the garden, even in the middle of winter. Robert Louis Stevenson once recorded in his diary, as if it were a surprise, "I went to church today and am not depressed." Someone has said, "I feel like unscrewing my head and ...

13. Meeting Jesus At The Well

John 4:1-26

Sermon

John N. Brittain

The familiar story of Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well is loaded with meaning. It is a pattern for considering our meetings with Jesus at various times in our lives. The story begins with Jesus asking this woman to perform a simple task, well within her ability: to get him a drink from the well. She did, after all, have the equipment. But she didn't want to do it and was a...

14. More Than Sex

Sermon

John N. Brittain

Song of Solomon 2:8-16a, 8:6-7; 1 John 3:11-23; John 15:12-17 My beloved speaks and says to me: "Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. ... Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lo...

15. No Partiality

Acts 10:34-43

Sermon

John N. Brittain

You may be looking at the most fortunate person on the face of the earth. Let me explain. It seems that without even entering, I've won several lotteries based all over the world. I've supplied them with all my personal information — social security number, bank accounts, all of that — so, any day now, millions of pounds and rupees and doubloons will be flowing into my accounts. And if that's not ...

16. Not What You Expected

Hebrews 2:10-18

Sermon

John N. Brittain

Some years ago, my wife and I took a group of students on a short-term mission trip to Belize, the only English-speaking country in Central America, where our main task was refurbishing a church-run elementary school. At the end of our time there, the congregation held a celebration dinner and program including traditional foods, costumes, songs, and stories: One of them was a traditional children...

17. Responsibility And Motivation

Ruth 1:1-22

Sermon

John N. Brittain

Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge;your people shall be my people,and your God my God. This passage from Ruth 1, so often read at contemporary weddings, conjures up mental images of a winsome and warmhearted love story that explains how Ruth, a Moabite woman, became an ancestor of the revered King David and, later, of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a simple story that dates back to ...

18. Set Apart at Christmas

Romans 1:1-7

Sermon

John N. Brittain

I am so old that I can actually remember when there was a difference between the number of "shopping days" until Christmas and the number of calendar days. They always ran a little box with that magical number on the front page of the Cleveland Press, itself now a faded memory. (For those of you under a certain age, this was because in the day most stores were not open for business on Sunday. Can ...

19. Showing Up

Ephesians 3:1-12

Sermon

John N. Brittain

We lived in Florida for a while in the 1980s and it was then that we learned about Tarpon Springs. Not a large city, it has the highest percentage of Greek Americans of any place in the US. This dates back to the 1880s, when Greek immigrants moving into the area were hired as sponge divers, a trade they had plied back in the old country. Today Tarpon Springs' main claim to fame is the Greek Orthod...

20. Small-Minded Christians in a Big World

1 Corinthians 1:10-17

Sermon

John N. Brittain

How familiar Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 1 sound! Chloe's people had reported quarreling among the believers. Imagine that — disagreements in a church! There were rivalries and backstabbing even in the very earliest days of the Christian community. Paul's words are worth examining because factionalism is a perennial issue in the Christian community, found not just within modern day congregations...

21. Something New, Something Old

Sermon

John N. Brittain

Matthew 13:31-36a, 44-58; Isaiah 49:1-6 The story is told of an American service man visiting a South Sea island during World War II. His friendly host proudly brought a copy of the Bible out of his hut and said, "This is my most prized possession." With obvious disdain, the GI replied, "Oh, I've outgrown that old stuff!" The islander, whose tribe had recently accepted Christianity and undergone s...

22. The Assumption Of Discipline

Matthew 6:1-4, Matthew 6:5-15, Matthew 6:16-18, Matthew 6:19-24

Sermon

John N. Brittain

You don't need to be told that we live in a superficial society. We (at least men) surf the channels on the television, catching a glimpse of multiple shows without really watching any one in depth. Increasing numbers of us are doing the same with the internet, confusing access to multiple sources of information for comprehension of it. We are obsessed with physical appearance, creating a massive ...

23. The Backside Of God

Sermon

John N. Brittain

Exodus 33:12-23; Matthew 22:15-22 Without wanting to be either flippant or blasphemous, I don't think it out of line to say that there is something a little odd about the story where Moses gets to see the back side of God. This is Moses, the one who went up the mountain and brought down the tablets of the law; the one at whose uplifted rod the waters of the Red Sea parted and then came back togeth...

24. The Christian Journey I: The Path

Mark 1:14-20

Sermon

John N. Brittain

Have you ever been lost, really lost? It can happen anywhere: in a dark forest where you've lost the trail or in a crowded shopping mall where you've lost sight of Mom; on the backroads of Indiana where all you can see is corn or in the bustling canyons of New York City where the buildings block out the sun. You can be lost in a foreign country where no one speaks your language and you don't speak...

25. The Christian Journey II: The Mountain

Sermon

John N. Brittain

Psalm 30; Exodus 24:15-18; Mark 9:2-9 Virtually every religion has regarded mountains as sacred places. Mircea Eliade, the great religious scholar, called mountains an axis mundi, a symbolic link between heaven and earth, between the divine and the human. For those of us from the flat lands of the midwest it may not be as obvious as it should be why this is so. There is something about a mountain ...

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