Showing 1 to 25 of 33 results
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
Early in January in northern Canada the sun peeks above the horizon for the first time after six weeks of hiding. An important dawn for Canada. Imagine how the lives of people in the northern latitudes would be different if they got used to the darkness and never even expected that a dawn would ever lighten their horizon again. The people to whom the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah witnessed and prea...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
Everyone knows the experience of dragging out of bed on a dark morning in January, stepping around the busy humidifier spewing mucous membrane-healing moisture, finding the door to the bathroom and flipping the switch -- whoops, no, not that one, as the fan roars prematurely -- there, the light switch. "Ouch!" we say or think, and the photons from Edison's folly crash against the reluctant retinas...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
I remember a news program which showed the release of a number of wild turkeys into the wilderness of southwestern United States. They were seeking to reestablish a strain of turkeys in that area. In order to track them and understand how they were doing, a little radio was affixed to the back of each of the turkeys. Can you imagine being able to sit at a screen and follow the whereabouts of all t...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
There is so much uncertainty in life that most of us look hard and long for as many "sure things" as we can find. A fisherman goes back again and again to that hole that always produces fish and leaves on his line that special lure that always does the trick. The fishing hole and the lure are sure things. A gardener finds it hard to switch from tried and true varieties of vegetables. Blue Lake or ...
5. Divine Naivet
Isaiah 63:7--64:12
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
If you ask a child for his favorite Christmas carol, you'd better be ready! He just might say, "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town." Well, you do know it, don't you? You'd better watch out, you'd better not cry Better not pout I'm telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town. He's making a list, checking it twice, Gonna find out who's naughty or nice Santa Claus is coming to town. He knows when yo...
6. Do You Hear What I Hear?
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
I'm a bird lover, and spring time is prime time to get excited about our feathered friends. This past week I watched as robins and other birds scrounged bits of straw and other stringy things from my garden. It is nest building time!  If you've ever built a house you know the amount of time and effort it takes. Countless hours examining huge books of wall paper samples, floor plans, paint colors a...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
"Love is a many splendored thing...." Or so we heard Don Cornwall and the Four Aces sing time and again. Of course you or I might have other words to describe love, depending on our situation. Love. "I love you." "I love to play golf." "I just love pistachio lush!" "It's tough to love some people." "Jesus loves me, this I know." Love. What can be said about love that has not already been said? ...
8. From A Distance
Exodus 24:1-18
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
Heroes are a part of the human experience. They motivate, stimulate, encourage, and provide role models. There's something about looking up to the one who did something that is so far beyond most everyone's reach or ability. "Wow! I could never do that!" we say. All through the Olympics my wife and I joked about what we would look like if we tried to jump off the ski jump or leap into the air with...
9. Growing Faith
Romans 4:1-25
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
It's an old joke, but an insightful one: A man slipped off the edge of a cliff, and just before he fell the hundreds of feet to the valley floor below, he grabbed a protruding branch. There he was, dangling precariously from that little branch, afraid that any second it would pull out from the side of the cliff.  "Help!" he began to cry. "Help! Is anyone up there?!" Finally, after no answer, he be...
10. Height Advantage
Ephesians 1:15-23
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
One of the key inventions of the modern world is the geostationary or geosynchronous satellite, many of which are now orbiting the earth today. The fancy term "geostationary" means that the satellite's orbital velocity exactly matches the rotation of the Earth under it. Therefore it remains stationary in the sky, typically orbiting about 22,000 miles above the earth. The first operational geosynch...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
As long as men and women and boys and girls have inhabited this planet, they have sought to control their lives in whatever ways possible. In order to have a better harvest, they have experimented with different crops, different fertilizers, and different methods of planting. In order to kill more game for food, they created more and more advanced kinds of bows, more accurate arrows, more deadly ...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
I've always been amazed by spiders. I love to watch them spin their webs and catch their prey. I remember as a child we had lots of spiders in our garage and we would catch flies and other bugs and throw them into a web to see the spider come rushing out along the strands to plunge in the paralyzing digestive juices. It would then wrap the prey up in a nice little bundle, for a late-night snack.  ...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
In the course of my growing up I was in a great variety of clubs and groups. But no club had as stringent and compelling rules, and no club demanded daily attention to its guidelines for behavior and action quite as much as a particular club which met in our home. It met usually three times a day, and the meetings were always at meal time. I'm talking about The Clean Plate Club! Now just in case t...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
One of the greatest challenges of life is to stay in touch with reality and hold on to hope at the same time. And let it be said, clearly and unequivocally, that precisely just such a stance describes the committed Christian. Some would boast of a strong faith, but would build it by ignoring the realities of the world around them. Others see clearly the reality of the world around them and theref...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
I remember a song of some years back that I never liked. The singer screamed as much as he sang, and he repeated the words over and over again. But the message and the title of the song I remember well, and so will you: "I can't get no satisfaction!" As we think about our lives today, is it not true that there are those days, those weeks, and those periods in our lives when we could easily intone ...
16. So Great a Love
Ephesians 2:1-10
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
I've been trying to decide whether it's good or bad that one cannot fully appreciate what others are going through in life, either their joys or their sorrows, until one has experienced them oneself.  It's probably more on the bad side, if we are not as sensitive either to people's joy or pain, leaving them feeling lonely, either in need of more compassion or celebration than is being offered.  On...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
How many of you know what BASE jumping is? BASE jumping is the very scary sport of jumping off Buildings, Antennae, Spans, and Earth objects. If you want to do it more than once, you jump with a parachute or perhaps a hang glider. Some of you may have seen examples of this daring sport on television.  An example: Austrian extreme sportsman Felix Baumgartner, 30, took a sunrise swan dive off the o...
18. Stop the Offerings!
Hebrews 10:19-39
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
Go with me to the year 1968, to the basement of Good Shepherd United Methodist Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. I was the student assistant at that church, while attending Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. One Sunday morning, immediately following the Sunday school hour, the senior high teacher came hurrying into the fellowship hall and engaged me in an almost desperate conversatio...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
One of the typical difficulties of days like today is connecting the ritual and annual stories of Palm Sunday with the stuff you came in here today worrying about!  Okay, so Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey 2,000 years ago. Hey, that's cool. But, you say, I'm worried about paying for repairs to my Chevy so I can ride into Buffalo to go to work! Okay, so the people were all excited about Jesu...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
Christmas has a way of bringing back memories. One that came to my mind as I was preparing this message was when my family would be driving home at night in the car and my father would lead us in singing a song. To all of us family members who remember those fun, cozy journeys toward home, there are many layers of meaning to the words. The song goes like this: There's a long, long trail awinding,...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
Ever need a sign of hope? Ever need a sign that things are going to be all right? Ever need a sign that you were going to pass the test, or that she wasn't going to break up with you? Ever need a sign that God was still around or that life was still worth living? Ah, we all know of the need of a sign, don't we? It's funny how we are built. Inside, I mean. We can have proofs and explanations and i...
22. The Holiness of the Sacred
1 Corinthians 1:18--2:5
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
In the April 7, 1999, issue of The Upper Room, Merial Scott of South Dakota wrote the following: One summer morning when I was very small, Mother woke me with the words, "Get up and dress quickly now. I'm frying trout for breakfast." Astonished, I wondered how we could have newly caught fish when the day had just begun. At the table, I learned that my father had driven at dawn to one of his favor...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
The chasm between the realities in which two different people live can be vast. Such was the case in July of 2000 in Pompano Beach, Florida. Jamie Dean Petron, aged 41, had killed and injured two victims in a robbery there, when he then forced his way into the home of seventeen-year-old Althea Mills, who was there with some younger relatives. Althea was threatened by the gunman, but she said that...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
"A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver" (Proverbs 25:11). John, the gospel writer, puts it this way: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ..." These verses of scripture speak of the power and beauty in rightly-chosen words, and therefore speak of these incomparable words from the ninth chapter of Isaiah, the text for this Holy...
Sermon
Paul E. Robinson
Schindler's List is a movie one doesn't forget. One of the most horrible scenes is that of the commandant who, for his own amusement and in order to watch the prisoners scatter, uses a rifle to shoot some of the Jews in the courtyard of the prison camp. This one vignette graphically portrays the opposite of the message the prophet Isaiah was communicating in the portion of his writings we are look...
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