Sermons Archive

Good Friday is a day of darkness. The somber story of Jesus death, the central event.  Around his death, leading up to and after, we have pain, fear, foreboding, and despair.   There is darkness at noon, and for three hours after, the sun is hidden away.  The temple curtain is torn.  Jesus gives up his spirit to God. In Luke’ s account, there...

“Word Watch” is a column published weekly in the Hartford Courant.   In this column, questions about words and their usage are explored and discussed.  Many times, people send in questions for the writer of the column, frequently asking about a word’s history and correct use.  I have always found it a thought-provoking column to read.

An...

As you know, those of us who are interim ministers, get to be interviewed by church search committees quite often.  When you are in a profession that leads you to a new setting every couple of years, one of the things that you become quite used to is being interviewed.  When I realized the importance of having some interviewing skills early in...

I don’t know when I’ve been as eager to turn the page of a calendar as I was this morning.   This has been a February I am glad to see come to an end and today, we gather on the first day as well as the first Sunday in March.   Looking ahead, when we gather in four weeks, on the 5^th and last Sunday in March, it will be Palm Sunday...

Baptized. Beloved. Spirit. Wilderness. Tempted. Proclaiming. Repent. Believe. Good News.

In these few words, we can summarize the verses we have just heard from Mark’s gospel. Mark is brief, he is to the point, and easy to remember. This is always Mark’s way. He is in a rush to tell us the story and to get us to Jerusalem. His is the...

Today is a day set aside in approximately 600 faith communities throughout the nation and 13 other countries, whose pastors, priests, rabbis and imams, have committed themselves to highlight, in the course of worship, the respective truth and value that both religion and science have to proclaim.  At different times throughout history, these...

Sermon    02-01-15         Romans 7:14-25             Mark 1:21-28

          One of my faith-shaping moments in seminary, many years ago, came when one of the other students took on a special project on his own.   For about one week, he asked everyone he met, at the school, at his field education placement, and anyone he thought would...

Sermon   01-18-15          1 Samuel 3:1-18       John 1:43-51

          The call of Samuel is not a Bible story I would imagine a great many people are especially familiar with.   It happened a long time ago and there are so many other stories in Scripture describing encounters between God and humanity which grab our attention.   Yet it...