Jim Bundy

Call to Worship: Voice 1: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in times of trouble. Voice 2: Be still and know that I am God. Voice 1: Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea. Voice 2: Be still … Read more

I’m not sure how many times—but more than once or twice in my thirty years in the ministry—my sermon title for the first Sunday in Advent has been “What Are We Waiting For?” I did not try to go back and look up those old sermons, partly because I didn’t have any time or any … Read more

Scripture: Luke 1:5-23. Somewhere recently I ran across a phrase that caught my attention. The piece I was reading referred to “the curse of the professionally religious”. I like that phrase, and I think it has a number of applications. One of the curses of being professionally religious, I think, is to feel the need … Read more

I think somewhere I wrote that this service would be shorter than usual, and I will try to do my part to make that so. I’m thinking though of my Uncle Frank. When I was little, Christmas was a time I got to see my uncle Frank, one of the relatively few times I got … Read more

Scripture: Psalm 131; Isaiah 30:15-18; Mark 1:1-11. Well, so it’s a new year, a new millennium…at least for those of us who think in terms of the western Christian calendar and who don’t care that for Jews this is the year 5761, for Moslems 1421, and that it’s something else for the Chinese and again … Read more

Scripture: Mark 8:27-29; Mark 1:21-28, 31-35. I thought we should talk about Jesus. At least I’m going to talk about Jesus in my sermons in the weeks ahead, for the forseeable future. Meanwhile a few of us will be studying the gospel of Mark, and talking about Jesus quite a bit there. I just thought … Read more

Scripture: Mark 1:35-39; Mark 1:9-15; John 3:1-10. I want to begin today where I left off last week. Maybe I sort of acted like I was done with the sermon last week, but I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t. In fact most sermons are not really done. You just find a place to stop. Because … Read more

Scripture: Mark 2:1-12. Forgiveness…is one of those topics that’s way too big to talk about in a few minutes on a Sunday morning. Of course, that’s true of anything worth talking about; you can’t really say very much in a sermon space. So that’s a dilemma we’re sort of stuck with as far as sermons … Read more

Scripture: Matthew 5:43-48; Romans 12:9-21. The idea of loving your enemy comes, of course, from Jesus. We heard it again this morning as part of the reading from Matthew. Those of us here at Sojourners, all but the newest visitors here, have also heard one of our own members, R.G., express this need as a … Read more

Scripture: Isaiah 25:6-10; Luke 14:7-24. Those who were here for the Ash Wednesday service a few days ago heard the scripture from Luke then. We got to warm up on this passage a little bit anyway. Let me begin though not with my interpretation of this passage from the Bible (I’ll get to that), but … Read more