Prophecy

Scripture: Jeremiah 1:4-19 Back when summer was young, a month or so ago, at one of the regular meetings of the worship committee I asked the group if they had any suggestions for me regarding possible preaching topics during the summer months. I explained that summer often seems to me like a good time to … Read more

Touched

Scripture: Jeremiah 31:15-17, 31-34 For those of you who weren’t here last week, I devoted the sermon to Jeremiah, the book of Jeremiah and the man we know through the book. I was trying to give a sort of overview of what the book and the man, the prophet, are all about, with the intention … Read more

Exile

Scripture: Jeremiah 29: 1, 4-14 I’m going to begin the sermon before we hear the scripture reading today. As you see from the bulletin, we’re still on Jeremiah. I’ve made it through two sermons based on Jeremiah without saying very much at all about the times in which Jeremiah lived, the history he was a … Read more

Where Is God?

Scripture: Jeremiah 14:1-9 Sometimes as a child begins to think about God and wonder about God she might ask a question like “where is God”, which might be just one way of putting into words much larger, more difficult questions about who God is and what God is like and how we’re supposed to understand … Read more

The Words of God

Scripture: Jeremiah 20:3-18 I’ve been taking what has turned out to be a series of sermons on Jeremiah, if you will pardon what sounds like a sports cliché, one week at a time. No looking ahead. No planning what I want to say three weeks from now. Just a week at a time, and after … Read more

Friend and Enemy

Scripture: Matthew 16:21-28 You may have gathered from the fact that the scripture this morning is from Matthew that I am moving on from Jeremiah. And if you gathered that, you would be somewhat right, but only somewhat. There are actually lots of things still on my mind from Jeremiah, but one in particular that … Read more

The Teachings of Jesus

Scripture: Matthew 11:25-30; Mark 1:14-15 OK, so now I really am done with Jeremiah. For those who may be relatively new to Sojourners or haven’t been around these last few months, I’ve been preaching on texts from the book of Jeremiah for about the last month and a half. But it’s a new month, a … Read more

Be Not Anxious

Scripture: Matthew 6:25-34 Last time I preached, I said that I planned for the remainder of this fall and maybe into the winter—who knows—to do a series of sermons on the teachings of Jesus. There are a lot of them, and they cover a lot of ground, touch on lots of topics, come in the … Read more

Neighbor

Scripture: Luke 10:25-37 I have spent the better part of this past week being sick with bronchitis and am still not fully recovered. I had promised myself that since this is a communion service and since we have a congregational meeting following worship today, that I would keep the sermon on the short side. With … Read more

Riches

Scripture: Mark 10:17-23 There is a teaching of Jesus in the scripture reading for this morning. The question is: What is it? It’s not stated directly. It comes in the form of a story, and although stories do have messages and teachings in them, they are very often not unambiguous ones. Stories are open to … Read more