Brian's Sermons

1 Kings 19:1-18 Have you ever heard of the phrase “mountaintop experience?” The idea is that there are some experiences that take us to the mountaintop. These are the best experiences of life, and when they are over, you just don’t want to go back to your everyday life. Church camp was often, for me, a mountaintop experience. I would go to camp every summer and by the end of camp, I was on fire! I was ready to win my entire school for Christ. There’s a problem with the mountaintop experience, however, and that is simply that we don’t live on the mountaintop. At some point, we have to come back down. In scripture, one notable mountaintop experience was when Jesus went up on the mountain with Peter, James, and John, and was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and he was joined there by Elijah and Moses! Peter, maybe even recognizing the amazing experience, suggested that they build shelters, one each for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses. But Jesus rebuked him and Jesu...

1 Kings 18:`-39 James 5:17-18:   Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. As we catch up with our normal guy Elijah, he has had quite the adventure in trusting and obeying God and accepting God’s provision. When God told him to leave the king’s court and go hide in the ravine and be fed by ravens and drink from the brook, Elijah went. When the brook ran dry, God sent him to a widow in Zaraphath, where God miraculously multiplied her meager flour and oil supply, feeding him, her and her family until God once again brought rain. To finish up that passage (and I apologize for not being able to get everything in – time is short), her son died, but God, through Elijah, brought him back to life! So in the third year of the famine, God tells Elijah he’s going to send rain once more. So Elijah, led by God (a...

Before I get to today’s scripture, I want to read another one.  I want to start with James 5:17-18:  Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. As I was preparing for the last five weeks I will be preaching here, I wanted to have a theme; I didn’t want to just preach five stand-alone sermons that don’t really have anything to do with one another. I wanted to find something that speaks to us today, no matter what we are doing. But I also didn’t want to go to my favorite, “pet passages” if you will. So I ended up with one of my favorite heroes of the Bible. Sometimes we can get caught up in the “hero” thoughts, thinking that this person or that person is so spiritual or so powerful or so whateverful that I could never do anything like this. This is the reason that I chose to read the passage from James be...

Exodus 3:1-6 1 Samuel 3:1-10 Isaiah 6:1-8 Jeremiah 1:4-10 I read you four call stories from the Bible: Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. They are amazing stories. Moses already had an awesome start to life, being saved from death by his mother putting him in a basket in the reeds in the Nile, and he was saved by the Pharaoh’s daughter, of all people. But here he is, years later, toiling away in Midian, tending sheep, when God speaks to him through a burning bush. Then there is Samuel, whose mother prayed fervently for a child, and when her child was born, she brought him into the sanctuary of the Lord to be raised there. Though the word of the Lord was rare in those times and people just weren’t having visions, God spoke to the boy Samuel in an audible voice. Isaiah had an awesome vision in which God spoke to him, asking, “Whom shall I send?” and Isaiah answered, “Here I am, send me.” And as for Jeremiah, we simply read that “the word of the Lord came to...

This service was quite different from our usual service. There wasn't a sermon, exactly, but the following is what happened during the service. We had actors who portrayed some of the characters, and the children's choir and adult choir were the crowds in Jerusalem. The children's choir also joined Jesus as the disciples for the "Last Supper" and had Communion with him. This morning we celebrate a little differently than we usually do. On the calendar, Palm Sunday is listed as Palm/Passion Sunday. We celebrate Palm Sunday, when Jesus rode victoriously into Jerusalem, but the cries of “Hosanna” are quickly drowned out by the cries from the crowd: crucify him! A hallmark of Judaism was a required pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After Jesus walked on this earth, Christians, too, made the journey to Jerusalem to walk where Jesus walked. Over time, churches outside Jerusalem began to commemorate Jesus’ final days with their own prayer walks, mirroring the “statio...

Luke 18:35-43 One of the worst feelings in the world is when you can’t find something – you know you just had it, but now you can’t find it. What’s worse is when it is right in front of you and you still can’t find it. About 20 years ago, there was a fad – 3D hidden pictures. The idea was if you looked hard enough at the right angle, then you would see a hidden picture. Honestly, I could almost never see the picture and I always wondered if there really was one. The idea that someone else could see what I couldn’t always drove me nuts. But it’s a mainstay in Jesus’ ministry; sometimes it seems like the least likely were the ones who saw things the most clearly. In the passage immediately before the one I read today, (Luke 18:31-34) Jesus took the Twelve aside and told them, “We are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written by the Prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled. He will be handed over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him, spit on him, flo...