Lent 5A: Just About Everywhere
In one of her short stories the writer Annie Dillard has a scene in which a family is sadly gathered at a grave to commit a loved one’s body to the earth. At one point the minister intones the familiar words from I Corinthians 15, “Where, O Death, is thy sting?” Upon hearing that, one…
Luke 2:1-20
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt once published some very intriguing data on what he calls “elevation,” which is the opposite of disgust. We all know that there are any number of things that disgust us or cause us to feel revulsion. When we witness hypocrisy, cruelty, betrayal, and the like, we recoil–there are even certain physical sensations…
The Child’s Leading
Don’t you wish sometimes you could have been there, could have seen them in person? I mean the disciples and, of course, Jesus himself. You hear people say things like that once in a while. Wouldn’t it have been something to have been able to meet Peter, to shake Matthew’s hand? What if even now…
All Locked Up
Why didn’t they go looking for him? Today we pick up right where we left off last week on Easter here in John 20. When last we saw the disciples, Mary Magdalene had just burst in with the excited and exciting news, “I have seen the Lord!” Earlier that day, when Mary told these same…
Every Creature
Like many of you when on vacation, my family and I also had a nice summertime opportunity to enjoy the outdoor world of God’s creation on our recent trip to northern Michigan. We climbed the Sleeping Bear Dunes and marveled afresh at what a colossal pile of sand the winds have heaped up there over…
The Elegant Universe
It was exactly 100 years ago in 1905 when an unknown patent clerk named Albert Einstein published a series of papers detailing what he called “special relativity.” In one fell swoop, Einstein shattered centuries’ worth of scientific theories about the fundamental nature of reality. The theories of Isaac Newton and his mechanical understanding of the…
How Majestic!
The poet of Psalm 8 stared into the night sky and was properly dazzled at what he saw. But to put it mildly, what he did not see was a lot! Had this psalmist been able to spend a scant ten minutes looking through a telescope he would doubtless have fainted in wonderment. Ancient astronomers…
All Cry Glory!
Thunderstorms. Even as we sit here in church, right this moment there are likely upwards of 2,000 thunderstorms going on across the earth. On average each day 45,000 such storms occur. They are among the most powerful forces we know. In the simplest sense, but also in perhaps the most boring sense, a thunderstorm is…
Throughout All Generations
Few scientific facts amaze me more than what Albert Einstein discovered about time. Each year on New Year’s Eve we briefly pay attention to the ticking of the clock, counting down the minutes and seconds until midnight. Mostly, though, we don’t watch time pass that intentionally. The watch on my wrist, the clock on my…
Sermon Manuscripts
Here at the Center for Excellence in Preaching we strive to be very ecumenical in both the resources we offer and the audience in the wider Church that we seek to reach. But our Center is a part of Calvin Theological Seminary where—like any number of other seminaries—we have for many years been using Paul Scott Wilson’s The Four Pages of the Sermon as our homiletical teaching method.
Many of our alumni seek to utilize the deep structure and the “grammar” of Four Pages in their weekly preaching. But some of those same pastors have asked for help in the form of sample sermons that try to wield Wilson’s model well. The manuscripts labeled Four Pages: (sermon title) are demonstrations of this model of sermon-writing. There are also sample sermons for seasonal enrichment. These are labeled with the liturgical season and sermon title.
We hope these sermons are both instructive and inspirational!