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Symposium 2018: Dusty Faith

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John 15:1-8

Easter 5B

When I was a pastor, I felt a sense of personal hurt whenever members transferred to other congregations, particularly when such transfers had nothing to do with a job relocation or a geographic move, as is sometimes the case.  It was made worse by the fact that lots of such people never say good-bye, never…

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Acts 8:26-40

Easter 5B

If the Holy Spirit is a bit like a stone dropped into the middle of a pond, then Acts 8:26-40’s story is like one of the concentric rings that ripples out from it and across God’s world.  But it’s only one of the first of a series of rings that continues to spread to this…

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1 John 4:7-21

Easter 5B

If you preached on the Lectionary selection from 1 John 3 last week—and if you read the sermon commentary for that text that I posted here on the CEP website—then you will know a hard truth as we face this text: we probably both shot our wad on “love” last Sunday!  So much of this…

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John 10:11-18

Easter 4B

Today we don’t have shepherds much in the wider society.  Today we have managers.  But shepherds and managers are not the same. Whenever Jesus uses the pastoral image of a shepherd for himself, the point is nearly always the same: as the good shepherd of his sheep, he will risk his life and even temporarily…

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Acts 4:5-12

Easter 4B

What in the world got into Acts 4’s Peter?  Or to put it more theologically, who in the world got into the apostle?  I sometimes wonder if even his companion John didn’t blink his eyes or try to clear his ears to make sure it was Peter who was speaking. Of course, Peter’s talking was…

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1 John 3:16-24

Easter 4B

“Love” is a word everyone knows and everyone understands.  Or so we think.  But if that is so, why is it that when we are called to preach on “love,” it can feel so daunting?  Maybe it’s because we use the same word for so many things.  It would not be unusual, for instance, to…

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Luke 24:36-48

Easter 3B

The end of Luke’s Gospel sums it all up pretty well.  In swift strokes of Luke’s quill, we move from Easter Sunday evening directly to the Ascension of Jesus (just beyond the bounds of this lection).  We learn from Luke’s other New Testament contribution, Acts, that Jesus lingered in physical form for a good forty…

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Acts 3:12-19

Easter 3B

When our family visited China a number of years ago, my wife had a hard time keeping up with our sons who all stand over 6 feet 4 inches tall.  So we’d often walk a few steps behind them.  As we did so, we lost count of how many people passed them, turned around and…

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1 John 3:1-7

Easter 3B

It keeps coming up like a bad burp.  So much of 1 John is lyric.  Few passages talk better about the meaning of love than ones you can find in John’s first epistle.  The opening verses of this third chapter likewise are simply gorgeous, waxing eloquent on the love lavished on us by God our…

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