Sunday, November 1
Jonah runs from the mission God gives him, heading as far from God's face as he can get, and God answers the running with a storm, a rescue, and a fish. The sermon reads Jonah's flight as a mirror of our own resistance to God's mercy and his invitation, held inside the truth that God keeps moving toward the one who flees.
Sunday, October 25
Two women in Mark give wildly different amounts, two pennies and a year's wages, and Jesus honors both as the same kind of gift: costly, joyful, and given with no expectation of return. Pure generosity comes from love, not from the size of the gift.
Sunday, October 18
God has entrusted us not only with gifts and work but with each other, and Paul's picture of the body of Christ says we are joined by one Spirit and actually belong to one another, so cutting people off is cutting into ourselves.
Sunday, October 11
The sermon looks at Lydia and at Luke in Acts 16 and asks what it takes for a church to stop being a place you attend and become a community you belong to, where ordinary people take real responsibility for the mission God has given them.
Sunday, October 4
Paul tells the philosophers in Athens that God made every nation and marked out the exact places where people would live, so that they would reach for him and find him. The sermon asks why you live where you live, and suggests that alongside your own reasons there are God's reasons, and that a Christian is placed in a city to steward it rather than to take from it.
Sunday, September 27
Jesus entrusts his followers with a message to speak and a life to live, and he holds back the preaching of the full gospel until Peter understands that the Messiah saves by dying rather than by winning. Proclaiming Christ crucified and demonstrating that same self-giving love belong together.
Sunday, September 20
Jesus is the one building his church and saving the world, and he hands his people keys to the kingdom so that ordinary lives become participation in what God is already doing.
Sunday, September 13
David, on the run and sleeping rough, prays in the dark by remembering and chewing on who God has been to him, and that same kind of remembering is offered to us in our own sleepless and uncertain nights.
Sunday, September 6
Prayer is the first thing, not the last resort: Jesus kept a life of prayer before anything else, and Psalm 63 shows David doing the same in a desert of need. The sermon asks what it would look like to reclaim the morning and the evening for God.
Sunday, August 30
Generosity is not a transaction that gets us something back but a practice shaped in secret before God, done without self-consciousness, and motivated by an eternal perspective rather than by what we can see or use.