Summer Worship Times

Don't forget we will have one worship service at 9:30 am for the summer!

Sermon: Fifth Sunday in Lent 2013

Last Updated on Sunday, 24 March 2013 13:39

Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 17, 2013
Text: Luke 20:9-20

90 percent of Americans claim to believe in God–but what kind of God do they believe in?  For some, He is the nice, neat God they salute for an hour a week and then live the rest of their lives as if He doesn’t exist.  
Jesus Christ visited planet earth 2,000 years ago to reveal God to us.  Like last week’s parable ,commonly known as the story of the Prodigal Son was really more about the Loving Father, today’s parable can tell us about ourselves, but I want to focus on what it tells about God.

Jesus said, “A man planted a vineyard, and rented it out to tenants and went away for a long time.” The people of Jesus' day would have been familiar with that arrangement.  Many people were tenant farmers, working the land of another who lived far away.

When you stop to think about it, all of us really are just the tenants here, not the owners.  Everything we possess is on loan from God.  God created this world.  He is the owner of this vineyard called Planet Earth.  He has placed us here with the responsibility to manage it.  We don’t really own anything; we’re just sort of like the tenant farmers.  The Psalmist proclaimed, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it (Psalm 24:1).”

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Sermon: Lent Midweek Reconciliation, 2013

Lent Midweek 5
March 13, 2013
Text: 2 Corinthians 5:18-20

EXAMPLE: South African Truth and Reconciliation Project.

St. Paul tells us that God ‘reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us – we implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.’ (2 Cor. 5:18-20)

Are you at perfect peace with everyone?  Are you friends with everyone you know?  Probably not.  Most likely, you do things that offend other people.  And just as likely someone else has done things that have offended you.  Don’t forget that for every person that gets under your skin, there is someone who thinks you’re a jerk too.

Tonight’s theme is “reconciliation.”  Reconciliation is a term we use these days and in pretty much the same way as people used it in the Bible times.  It means ‘to restore a friendship,’ or ‘to make up after a quarrel.’  It means changing people from being enemies into being friends. 

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Sermon: Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost 2011

Last Updated on Tuesday, 12 March 2013 20:48

The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
October 9, 2011
Text: Matthew 22:1-14

Back in April, we were all treated to the wedding of the decade, the Royal Wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton.  Anyone here get invited?  Well, I did.

As you can imagine, I was very thrilled to be included.  It was such an honor.  They didn’t even invite President Obama, but they invited little ol’ me.  So I made a to-do list for myself.  I was going to need a haircut from one of those fancy places uptown.  I was going to get myself some new threads to wear and polish my shoes.  But then, as I started thinking about it, I realized it was going to be a major pain.  I would be missing all the new episodes of Jersey Shore. So I decided to respectfully decline.

Actually, now that I think about it, that was a pretty lame excuse.

Obviously, that didn’t really happen.  But I do remember something that really did happen when I was a child that is kind of similar.  I think I was probably in third or fourth grade, when my dad picked me up from school and wanted to take me to a new traveling science exhibit that he’d read about it the paper of moon rocks and other artifacts from NASA’s moon expeditions.  And I didn’t want to go.  I wanted him to take me home to watch the reruns of Gilligan’s Island, so that’s what we did.

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