Jr.'s Sermons

In the wake of Jesus' resurrection and ascension, the Church has received the power to join in God's mission. Now it's time for us to hurry up and wait - by joining God's great dance!

We like to imagine that we’re the heroes of our own stories. But we’re all-too-often reminded we’re not in control of even the most basic areas of our lives. This is good – a chance for us to remember that we’re living in God’s story,...

Churches often have a list – official or not – of people who are “out of bounds”, people who don’t fit into the neat categories we use. In the story of Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, we find a call to move beyond our...

Our culture has a particular definition of what counts as beautiful, a carefully constructed image into which nearly no body fits. Much as in the days of the early church, the powers that be have a vested interest in controlling our bodies. When...

We are a nation of rebels, in a world of rebellion. We’ve all chosen our way, our vision of the good life, at the cost of someone else, on both personal and national levels. And when we stop to consider the fate of rebels in our world, the picture...

We live in a world of scarcity, where we’re convinced there’s not enough to go around. But God created a very good world, one that was not a zero-sum universe. In the wake of Pentecost, we see the early church living into this abundant creation...

We’re all well-acquainted with failure – in our personal lives, our vocations, our dreams and aspirations. When we fail, fear of failing again can paralyze us. But what we don’t see is that God is working, even in our failures, to bring life...

We all cling to certain things in our lives – our jobs, our families, our beliefs. But all too often, the way we cling to those things brings exhaustion, despair, defeat – in a word, death. We find true life in letting go of our lives, allowing...

Many times, we don’t recognize when we are doing things that are destroying our life. For us its just the way it is, comfortable, what’s expected. Sin works this way too. It’s hard to see that the only result of a life lived that way is...

When someone challenges our identity, we get angry. But maybe the problem is that we’ve built our identities on the wrong things. Israel made the same mistake – they had allowed the Law and the Temple to define who they were, and injustice...

What labels do you carry in your soul? For good and bad, we all have many identities we’ve taken (or been given) by people in our lives. We begin to inhabit these identities, to take on the labels as who we are, even when they are toxic. The...

Say the word "Repent" and many of us get flashes of fire and brimstone. But in this first week of Lent, we see that Jesus' call to repent isn't judgment and condemnation. It's the fulfillment of God's promise not to war with humanity. Jesus'...

When we encounter painful circumstances, we seldom stop to ask how we’re contributing to the pain. We stay in that pain unchanged, or we leave, taking our brokenness into the next relationship or job or home. But God offers us something better than...

We imagine that to find God, we have to leave our everyday lives – carve out special time or make it to church on Sundays. God, it seems, can only be found outside our lives. But in Jesus, God reveals himself to be the God of the everyday. The God...

When confronted with the possibility that God is speaking to us, many of us are afraid. We’re convinced God’s call on our life is at odds with what we want for ourselves. Others are apathetic – we’re not convinced God is able to achieve the...

Many of us assume that God can’t talk to us – that because God is the all-powerful creator of the universe, we are incapable of understanding anything God would say to us. But because God has come to us in the person of Jesus, we can be confident...

Most of us assume God doesn’t speak to us. But what if God is speaking to us? What if we can learn to hear God’s voice in the middle of our everyday lives? The stories of Samuel and Nathanael teach us that learning to discern God’s voice in our...

So many well meaning people have the idea that when good things happen in their lives it means God is near them. And they also subscribe to the opposite notion that when bad things happen in their lives, when their lives are chaotic, it means that...

Christianity has become known as a religion full of rules – these “dos” and “don’ts” have become fences that keep Christians in line, corralling us like spiritual cattle. But according to Paul, now that Jesus has come, God has torn all...

In the endless press of the Christmas season, we often get distracted from the reason we’re celebrating. We reduce Christmas to presents and toys and parties – or, as Dr. Seuss says, we think Christmas “comes from a store.” But Paul’s...