Brian's Sermons

Last week we introduced an important and difficult concept. Poverty. We often think of poverty only in financial terms, but in reality, poverty is based in broken relationship. Broken relationship with God, broken relationship in ourself, broken relationship with others, and broken relationship with all creation. In the beginning, God created humanity to be in perfect relationship with him. But very quickly, we find Adam and Eve disobeying God. The response, as found in Genesis 3:23-25 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life . Now, instead of living in the Garden of Eden in perfect relationship with God, they have been banished, never to return. Never to walk together in the cool of the morning. Never again to speak face to face. Our relations...

Haggai 2:1-5 When I was in college, Northwestern University had a big observatory on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was really cool – it kind of looked like a giant alien bug. It was right by the intramural soccer fields, where I spent a lot of my time on the weekends, and it was even part of the logo for the college of arts and sciences. There was just one problem. Our proximity to Chicago rendered the observatory ineffective. You couldn’t see much of anything because of the light pollution. So they took out the telescope and sent it to Arizona or somewhere, and they tore down the observatory. Actually, that was a story in itself – the strange design of the observatory ended up causing the demolition team fits trying to destroy it. They tried to implode it with explosive charges, but instead of imploding, it just leaned. Then they tried to pull it over with big tow trucks, but that didn’t work either. They finally got it down and out of there, and a campus landmark was gone. ...