Mark 4:26-34

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

It’s early summer and the crops in the fields are growing. But if a dry heat comes, the crops can all burn out. Insects and hail can also wreak havoc. Farmers better buy crop insurance. Who know what the market will be? It’s a guessing game. You could just as well go to Vegas, but then you’d lose the fun of farming.

Once again, we ask: What is the problem? If there’s no problem or no question, then there’s no great need of a solution or answer. We have seen in this Season of Pentecost that we have a serious problem.

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Mark 3:20-35

A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost

As we live, things go wrong. They seem to go wrong no matter what. Today the Scripture lessons indicate something about the problem of original sin. What is that about? Well, things go wrong, and no matter what we do, bad things happen. It’s inevitable. You drive along, and a bird doesn’t fly fast enough in front of you, and you hit it. We’d like not to hit it, but we do.
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A Sermon for the Season of Pentecost

Mark 2:23-3:6

A teacher once said: “All thinking in Christianity is summed up in the problem of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments.” A lot of the problems are there. But that teacher may not be steering us rightly because it doesn’t matter where you begin – you can begin at the beginning or begin at the end – all of it is tied together, and it is one.

What then should be our starting point? You start with what the problem is. And the problem is sin and death. We are caught in an inevitable run through sin to death, and the question is: How can we get out of it? What can be done?

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John 3:1-17

A Sermon for the First Sunday after Pentecost

What draws the lessons together today is love. It is a very difficult matter because our culture is full of talk about love. If you look at the media, it’s all about: What is love? How does love work?
How do we keep from having the culture determine what it means?

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John 15:2-27; 16:4b-15

A Sermon for Pentecost Sunday

Some years ago, a missionary to New Guinea returned to his home congregation in the US and said to his pastor that the big challenge on the mission field was the problem of spirituality.
That missionary’s question goes to the heart of Pentecost Sunday. In order to get at this question of “spirit” and spirituality, it is helpful to go back to the Reformation itself.

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