James 2:1-10 [11-13] 14-17
A Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Remember the book, The Purpose Driven Life (2002)? It was a publishing success by any standard. Approximately fifty million copies (!) were sold. In this book Pastor Rick Warren gave a forty-day program of how to live the Christian life.
How do we live the Christian life? How do you make it happen so you walk the walk, and not just talk the talk?
James 1 and 2
A big event back in 2003 was the publication of the book, The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. The first day the book was released it sold one million hard-cover copies, making it the fastest selling adult novel in history. A few years later Brown wrote a sequel, The Lost Symbol, that also broke sales records.
What was The Da Vinci Code that is so popular? There are several reasons, chief among them being that the plot is about a conspiracy. Conspiracies are naturally popular because they claim that “others” have kept you in the dark, but we are letting you in on the big secret. “They” are keeping it from you. We are revealing it to you. That’s what sells.
The ELCA is yoked to the Episcopal Church USA through Called to Common Mission (CCM), which the ELCA adopted in 1999. ELCA leaders sold CCM as a gesture of unity, but it came at an exorbitant price. The ELCA had to give up its Reformation heritage of gospel-freedom. Gone was the Reformation’s one office of […]
A sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
John 6:56-69
You have heard the Gospel text for today. They is important words. You is thinking that, I can tell. You is thinking that they is important.
Maybe you’re really wondering if I’m losing it. How can I say that? You “is” They “is”? It says something about language. In the Seventeenth Century, the time of Shakespeare, the lower classes had no trouble saying: You “is.”
John 6:51-58
A Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
What is real? And what is really real? That’s what we’re about. What is really, really, really, really, really real? What is really real is that Jesus Christ truly is who we say he is. That is not just a nice idea, or a handy idea. What is it that we say?
We confess that the eternal God, Lord, Lord of lords, Creator, Father of all, became this human being, born about 4 B.C., who had a true mother, and who walked on earth and died. Truly human. Not walking two inches off the earth. Truly human. Of course, truly God as well. And as it says at the Council of Chalcedon (451), “unmixed and undivided,” and stop there! Don’t try to sort that out. That is the basis of what we confess, and when we confess that, we say: That’s the reality, that is the reality behind everything and determines what everything is about.