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Sermon
J. Will Ormond
You are middle-aged or older if you remember when the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was first released. It was an exuberant, fast-paced musical about seven brothers on the frontier of the United States who were all looking for brides. Such "commodities" were rare in their part of the world. But, of course, in the end each brother got his bride. The story in our lectionary passage for today...
2. Our Living Hope
Luke 20:27-40
Sermon
Theodore F. Schneider
Not every question requires an answer. Sometimes the hope is that there will be no answer. Questioning can be "posturing," that is, taking a position rather than soliciting information. By the questions raised, information is given as well as asked. Often playing to the audience of listeners or bystanders, questions are intended to manipulate others while vindicating the posture of the speaker. On...
Sermon
Johnny Dean
Tradition – what a concept! What do you think of when you hear the word tradition? Exactly what is tradition? Mr. Webster’s dictionary defines the word tradition as "the transmission of knowledge, opinions, customs, doctrines, and practices from generation to generation, originally by word of mouth and personal example." We have all inherited traditions from our ancestors, which we will in turn pa...
Sermon
Larry R. Kalajainen
A certain minister has made it a policy for many years to refer "six-year-old theology questions" to his wife. Since she has taught very young children for many years, he says, she has a much better grasp than he does of how to address the questions which little kids ask. The other day, a first-grader brought a drawing of a skeleton into class where she teaches English as a second language. The ti...
Sermon
John Wayne Clarke
Today's Gospel Lesson is one that is troubling if you care about fairness. By that, I mean, would you deliberately try to fool someone just to see if you could get that person in trouble? I am not talking about getting a brother or sister in trouble, because that is almost part of growing up. I mean really getting someone in hot water. Would you do that? Our reading presents us with the Sadducees...
Sermon
King Duncan
Recently I heard about a man who had spent his life in the Air Force. One of his friends suggested that the family play the Air Force theme song at his funeral. His wife vetoed that idea. With a laugh, she said, “At your father’s funeral, we are not going to play a song that begins, ‘Off we go into the wild blue yonder!’” Arthur Schiff died last year at the age of 66. You may not recognize the na...
Sermon
King Duncan
A little girl walked into a pet shop. She went up to the shopkeeper and asked in a sweet little lisp, “Excuthe me, mithter, do you have any wittle wabbits?” The shopkeeper bent way down and put his hands on his knees so he would be on her level, and asked, “Do you want a wittle white wabbit or a wittle bwack wabbit? Or maybe that cute wittle bwown wabbit over there?” The little girl thought for ...
Sermon
King Duncan
Brian Rice of Maple Grove, Minnesota writes that recently his wife asked the question men most dread: “Honey, do you think I look fat in my new dress?” Brian was up to the test. Pointing to what he was wearing, he replied, “Do I look stupid in this shirt?” (1) It’s not easy to be married. Comedian Wendy Liebman says she went through a messy divorce. She says, “My divorce was messy because there...
Sermon
King Duncan
Author Barbara Johnson, in her book, Fresh Elastic for Stretched Out Moms, tells about a package she once received that was marked DAMAGED IN TRANSIT, BUT DELIVERABLE. There was a space at the top that said either DELIVERABLE or UNDELIVERABLE, and a big black crayon marked this package as DELIVERABLE! The string was hanging off it, the label was torn off, and tapes were hanging out of one corner, ...
Sermon
King Duncan
The Hollywood version of life after death is portrayed in Albert Brooks' movie, "Defending Your Life." Brooks plays the part of Daniel Miller, an advertising man who is killed by a bus. He finds himself in Judgment City along with many other people. They are ushered into the city with all the efficiency of a bus tour. Newly arrived persons are taken to what appears to be hotels and told to sleep b...
Sermon
The film "Amadeus" ends showing the funeral of the great musician Mozart. He was taken to his grave in a blizzard. There was a trap door in the end of his coffin. They dumped his body through that trap door into a giant hole in which there were several other bodies. The film takes several liberties with history, including the account of his death. Scholars have found that the weather reports for ...
Sermon
Today our good year in the company of Dr. Luke, the author of the Gospel that had been in focus through these months, begins to wind down toward the end. Are there any questions? If you have a question, and I suspect we have a few in mind, line up in the center aisle and wait your turn. Jesus has been teaching in the temple at Jerusalem, his disciples are at hand, and in the crowd his enemies as w...
Sermon
There came to him some Sadducees, those who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the wife and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and died without children, and the second and the third took her, and li...
Sermon
King Duncan
Jewelry salesman Alexander Makowski was devastated. Just three weeks before, in Phoenix, his sample case had been stolen. Now he had returned to the parking lot of the San Diego hotel where he was staying to find that his car and jewelry worth $100,000 were missing. Alexander could take no more. He climbed to the balcony over the hotel atrium lobby, lifted himself over the railing, and plunged fiv...
Sermon
King Duncan
Some Sadducees tried to trip Jesus up. They posed a question about a woman who married seven brothers one right after the other and was widowed by each. Whose wife, they asked, will she be in the resurrection? We know they were attempting to cause Jesus to say something damaging because the Sadducees did not even believe in a resurrection. Jesus ™ answer was that there is no marriage in heaven. Te...
Sermon
Molly F. James
Recently, I was in a bit of a hurry to get something done (which I am slowly discovering is rarely a good idea). I was moving things around at home, and I broke the lamp in my husband’s study. I felt very badly about what I had done, and I wanted to remedy the situation. I offered to go right out and buy him a new lamp. He said not to worry; it wasn’t his favorite lamp anyway, and we could go and ...
Sermon
King Duncan
I want to test how awake you are this morning. I’ve got a riddle for you: What question can you never answer “Yes” to? Are you ready for the answer? The answer is, “Are you asleep?” (1) It’s tough starting the morning with a riddle, isn’t it? Especially a groaner like that one. It reminds me of the story of a game show contestant, Bob, who’d made it to the final round, and he just had to answer...
Sermon
Leonard Sweet
We've all seen those old medieval world maps that tried to accurately represent the world as it was then known. At the edges of these maps, where knowledge and exploration petered out, imagination and fear took over. In a large, cautionary hand, the cartographers would scrawl over these mysterious regions the ominous warning, "There be dragons!" Like medieval map-makers, most of us as children al...
19. About Marriage
Luke 20:27-40
Sermon
King Duncan
The soloist had laryngitis. The flower girl was ill with pneumonia. The ring bearer had an accident in his blue-velvet pants just before the ceremony, and the mother-of-the-bride left her dress at home by mistake. Things continued to go downhill after the ceremony. It was the coldest day in Maryland in 20 years The newlyweds, Melissa and Tim Donnelly, had borrowed a 1941 Cadillac to ride away in....
20. Really!
Luke 20:27-40
Sermon
Leonard Sweet
The ultimate insult kids dish out today is to look down their noses and snort, “Poser!” A “poser” is a “wannabe” who will “never-be.” A “biker poser” wears a leather jacket, biker boots and drinks coffee from a Harley-Davidson mug, but has never ridden anything more powerful than a John Deere on a Saturday afternoon. A “rocker-poser” has the tough, trashy tattoos, the black T-shirts, but doesn’t...
Sermon
King Duncan
In a cemetery in Ribbesford, England, this epitaph was found on the tombstone of one Anna Wallace: "The children of Israel wanted bread /And the Lord sent them manna, Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife, And the Devil sent him Anna." A widow wrote this epitaph in a Vermont cemetery: "Sacred to the memory of /my husband John Barnes /who died January 3, 1803 His comely young widow, aged 23, has /man...
Sermon
Scott Bryte
If you could ask Jesus a question, any question, and be prom­ised a plain answer, what would you ask? There are a lot of big ones that have never been answered. Wouldn't it be great if you could just go up to Jesus and ask him one of life's big, profound eternal mysteries? "Why is there evil?" "What happens when we die?" "Why are we here?" Jesus was asked a lot of questions during the time he was...
23. His Teachings
Luke 20:27-40
Sermon
Brett Blair
This morning we are continuing our Lenten series on the Passion of the Christ, the last week of the life of Jesus. Previously we looked at the events of Sunday when he enters Jerusalem on the donkey fulfilling the Messianic prophecy of Zechariah. It was a day of celebration. On Monday Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, curses the fig tree, and clears the Temple of the moneychangers. It is a day of emotio...
Sermon
Brett Blair
Someone has figured that if we put all of the materials in the Gospels that tell us about the life of Jesus together that it would equal about 80 pages. Yet, most of that would represent duplication, for we know that some of the Gospel writers copied from others. If, therefore you eliminate the duplication, you would have only 20 pages that tell us about Jesus life and teachings. Of those 20 pages...
Sermon
King Duncan
In a civilized society, there are laws that cover almost every facet of human life. And sometimes those laws can be overreaching or burdensome. It’s the price we pay for living as part of a community instead of as a bunch of unorganized loners. But at least most of our laws make sense. Maybe we’d complain less about the laws of our state or town if we lived in a town where there are laws that don’...
Showing 1 to 25 of 28 results