Brian's Sermons

You Think You’ve Got Enemies When I think of enemies, I think of the big ones. I think of Stalin’s Soviet Bear. I think of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Today we have Al Qaeda and Islamic Fundamentalists. There are also pretend enemies, like the Boogieman – as a kid, I was scared of some guy named Mr. Freebish, who my dad threatened would come in and eat my vegetables if I didn’t eat them (I didn’t mind so much if he ate them; I was just scared of this stranger who would presumably break into the house to eat my food). Then there are characters from fiction, like Darth Vader. And over the course of our lives, there are times when we make other enemies, too. Like the bully down the street. Or the rival for your beloved’s attention. Or the person at work who always seems to at you. Most of us probably don’t have enemies who threaten to physically harm us, though if we have school-aged children or grandchildren, they might. Three weeks ago, we looked at Saul’s conversion to...

Six years ago at a conference clergy meeting, I was invited to participate in a “young clergy” group designed for pastors under 35 years old. A friend and I joked about being “grandfathered” in, as we were both 35. Though for years young people have been told not to trust anyone over 35, in clergy years, 35 is considered “barely out of diapers.” But, as I read to the children earlier, Paul writes to Timothy, telling him, “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith, and in purity.”   1 Timothy 4:12 Timothy was disregarded because he was too young. Now, there are some here who would consider themselves “young” but most of us aren’t, and none of us is getting any younger. But most of us have reasons why someone would look down on us. Maybe it’s not about youth, but instead we’re too old. Maybe we just don’t know the Bible well enough. Maybe we’ve got the wrong family name. Maybe we’re no...

Last Sunday we looked at Saul’s conversion – how he was persecuting Christians – the Bible puts it this way: he was breathing out murderous threats against the church. But Jesus met him on the road to Damascus and transformed him. We met Ananias, a regular guy who was instrumental in Saul’s conversion, even though the man God sent him to minister to was the worst of the worst. We also recognized that there were a bunch of regular men and women who were instrumental in our own conversions. Whether they were our family members or Sunday School teachers or friends, there were regular people who took an interest in our lives and our salvation. If that person who made a difference in your life is still alive, why don’t you take a little time this afternoon to write them a little handwritten note and send it to them? I can’t think of any reason anyone would not want to receive a letter like that. Anyway, today we will continue to look at some of the players in Paul’s life, people w...

Acts 9:1-22 Over the past couple of months, there has been a lot of talk about God being removed from our schools – last week, despite out-of-town threats of lawsuits, the Jackson School Board voted to keep the picture of Jesus that has hung in the school since 1947. What began as a rule against a government-sanctioned state religion has been interpreted as a requirement for the government to suppress religion and keep it completely out of the public sphere. We need look no farther than Europe to see the decline of the church’s influence in the public sphere. Sometimes it can be easy to shake our heads at how society has gotten worse and worse. It can be discouraging enough that it’s tempting to just give up. Transform the world? That’s not my job, and, oh, by the way, it’s impossible. The world doesn’t want transformed. Or, maybe for some of us, it’s a little closer to home – my family doesn’t want transformed. We’ve begun praying for a whole list of people, many of ...

Psalm 96 There is something about music that captures us. I have been in nursing homes where there are residents who hardly recognize their own family members, yet they can sing every word of their old favorite hymns. Nothing melts my heart like hearing my own son singing “How Great Thou Art” – isn’t there something precious about a child singing? When we sing the old songs of the faith, many of our hearts are moved; we remember the context in which we learned the song or a particular time that song was sung. One Sunday, a family was in tears leaving church, and I was mystified. There hadn’t been anything really emotional about the service, not that I could tell, anyway. But at the back door they told me that this particular day was the anniversary of burying their son, and that the song we’d just finished singing was one that had been sung at his funeral. The song brought back all of the memories of that day and all of the emotion immediately welled back to the surface. Not all ...