Brian's Sermons

Do you write a Christmas letter?  I have one friend who always (only?) includes all of the year’s low points.  Death and illness and tragedy make for a really upbeat Christmas letter.  Another family friend used to have glowing overbearing praise for one of their children and a one-sentence update about the other child.  We have written a satirical letter, a real update, a one-sentence-per-family- member update, and just “Merry Christmas from the Vinsons.” The big question is: What do you include in the letter?  What makes the cut?  Jude set out, eager to write about their shared salvation.  That’s a really great subject – salvation.  Salvation is a huge topic for conversation, and we could spend all day today speaking on it, but let’s look at it quickly.  In the Roman Empire, the title “Savior” was given to the Emperor.  So when you see “Savior” spoken of, it’s often in direct response to Rome, making sure everyone knows that salvation comes from God alone, and not from the gover

Last week we started Jude’s letter to the church – we got all the way through the first verse, the “who wrote it” and “who was it written to” of Jude.  Today we continue with his introduction.   Jude continues with the introduction to his letter: Mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance.  I like the way the New Living Translation puts it: May God give you more and more mercy, peace, and love. The concept of mercy is rooted in God himself.  In Exodus 33, Moses asked God to show him His glory.  And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” Do you think it’s fair for God to say “I’ll have mercy and compassion on whoever I want to have mercy on”? What do you think?  Let’s push on this for a moment. Does this mean God plays favorites?  To this I ask: does God have to show mercy? The answer is

As we get started today, I want to give you a little background.  First of all, I’ve preached in different ways for different times.  My first experience preaching was simply to pick a scripture and go with it.  Do all the research, write a sermon, each one standing alone.  Then I preached from the Revised Common Lectionary.  The Lectionary is a three-year plan of scriptures, four per week, and the idea is that if you use all four scriptures, you’ll get parts of the whole Bible in three years (or, if you only use one scripture, you’ll hit it in 12 years).  As an associate pastor, I was once handed a sermon to preach on a particular Sunday (which I found out later had been plagiarized to begin with).  More recently, I have been doing a “series” style of preaching, where we follow a certain topic (we’ve done such series as the Lord’s Prayer, Emotional Health, the armor of God, signs and wonders from the book of John, the Fruit of the Spirit).  But I realized that there’s one thing I have

Luke 8:19-21 Now Jesus' mother and brothers came to see him, but they were not able to get near him because of the crowd. Someone told him, "Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you." He replied, "My mother and brothers are those who hear God's word and put it into practice." In P.D. Eastman’s classic children’s book Are You My Mother , a baby bird hatches from his egg while its mother is out finding food.  Lonely and abandoned, the baby bird goes in search of his mom. What makes the story cute is how naïve the baby bird is – how he asks everyone and everything if they are his mother – he even asks a steam shovel.  He looks everywhere for his mother. It was one of the first books I learned to read (after P.D. Eastman’s other classic, Go, Dog, Go ), and it has a classic theme; the search for belonging.  Most of us can relate to this search; one of our fundamental needs is to belong.  “There are an endless number of symbols of be