Category: Sermons

When we vote, we tend to think about our own wants and needs. But Jesus implores us to put others before ourselves. How do we do that in politics? Rev. Sonya Brown invites us to consider how the practice of lament can help us hear the voices of the most vulnerable among us.

It feels harder and harder to disagree well. We hear frequent calls for civility and niceness. But for a people of faith, nice isn’t enough. Rather than settle for a superficial niceness, God calls us to imitate Jesus in offering a deep kindness. Kindness insists we treat others as though they are part of our family. How do we pursue kindness together in the next month?

Every institution has rules, both written and unwritten, that make it run. How should Christians engage a system with unjust rules? We explore another meal Jesus shares with Pharisees to discern how we can respond to voter suppression specifically as a people of faith.

All systems are comprised of physical artefacts. As we begin our exploration of systemic racism in America, we investigate the Confederate monuments we’re removing all over the country. How should persons of faith understand this issue, and more importantly: how does that illuminate how the artefacts in our daily lives are racialized too?

We’ve spent the whole summer learning all kinds of tools to read Scripture. But if we approach the Bible with the wrong attitude, we’ll still miss the God to whom the Scripture points. With some help from John and C. S. Lewis., we learn how to read the Bible mythically.

The idea that the Bible contains mythology makes a lot of us uncomfortable. But just like other genres, myth is there on purpose – and vital to our formation as God’s people. So how does myth work, exactly?

Faith doesn’t have to be an esoteric, theoretical thing. In fact, the letters in the Bible present us a window into how the earliest followers of Jesus navigated the complexities of faithfulness in the real world. How can these letters help us navigate our own faithfulness today?

How are the powerless to make their way in the world? Folktales – literally stories of the people – record tricks and traps those with no social or political capital use to shape the world around them. But… why are such stories in the Bible? And can they really form us spiritually? Michelle Reyes takes us into the story of Tamar to explore the tricksters and trickstars who enact Biblical justice – whatever it takes!

We look to books like Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes for rules to help us live more godly lives. But these books don’t want to make us smarter. They want to make us more wise. The difference is in how we see the world, and how these books can be guides to us, to help us live as God’s people in even the most complicated situations.