Federated Church Sycamore Sermon Podcast

This week’s sermon explores the Biblical narrative of King Herod and the nativity through the lens of modern social justice and psychological awareness. It contrasts Herod’s destructive fear, which manifested as a violent quest for total control, with the courageous actions of Mary, Joseph, and the Magi- who are reimagined here as "wise women" and foreigners. Pastor Eric suggests that fe...

In this message, Pastor Eric reflects on the world of fear--personal, familial, social, and political--engulfing Mary and Joseph on the first Christmas. Theirs was not a peaceful time to live. The circumstances surrounding Jesus' birth were not what many of us would expect God to choose to be born into. Fear was loud--just as it is in our world. And yet, this is precisely where we proclaim God...

This week's sermon explores the story of Joseph and Mary through the lens of human fear and societal pressure. Pastor Eric highlights how Joseph chose to defy cultural and religious expectations of honor and shame by offering solidarity with Mary—upon finding out she is pregnant with a baby that is not his— rather than subjecting her to public disgrace. True faithfulness and hope are defined here...

This sermon by Pastor Eric offers a reinterpretation of the Biblical figure Mary, mother of Jesus, moving beyond traditional romanticized or sanitized narratives. By highlighting the historical context of Mary’s life under the tyrannical rule of King Herod and the Roman Empire, we begin to meet a Mary who was not simply “meek and mild,” but a courageous figure who moved through her fear, confusion...

Pastor Eric’s sermon explores the question: “How can people maintain conviction when great personal sacrifice yields uncertain, unclear outcomes?” This question is brought into sharp focus through the story of John the Baptizer, who, while languishing in prison under Herod Antipas, sends a desperate message to Jesus, questioning if his entire ministry had been meaningful. Jesus responds not with c...

Pastor Eric’s sermon establishes the Christian season of Advent as a time that begins by confronting the harsh realities of suffering, fear, and darkness in the world, in contrast to traditional holiday cheer. The central guiding question posed is “What do you fear?” with Eric arguing that true, durable hope can only be found by developing a compassionate relationship with these anxieties rather t...

This week’s sermon centers on the idea that God’s favor is extended to the broken, flawed, and marginalized, fundamentally challenging traditional notions that God only calls the moral and upstanding. Pastor Eric argues that the biblical narrative consistently features imperfect people who are nevertheless embraced by God's mercy and grace. Pastor Eric reinterprets the Beatitudes as a radical...

This week’s sermon by Pastor Eric focuses on the biblical journey of Exodus as a metaphor for life, characterizing it as a continuous, unsettled three-part process of "out, through, and in" rather than a linear path to a final, stable conclusion. The speaker emphasizes that each generation is called to navigate its own "wilderness" and that the work toward liberation and justic...

This week’s sermon, delivered by Sheldon Turner as a guest speaker, centers on a personal struggle with the concept of a jealous or angry God and the meaning of the Commandments against worshipping false idols. Sheldon identifies common idols such as wealth, fame, and nationalism, before moving to more subtle idols that people mistakenly worship, including their vocations, financial stability, and...

Pastor Eric’s sermon explores the profound meaning of the Exodus and the Ten Commandments, arguing that liberation from slavery in Egypt was not an end goal but a beginning leading to a covenantal way of life. Pastor Eric reinterprets the commandments not as rigid rules but as a framework for living in justice and equity that fosters the well-being of all creation, contrasting it with the exploita...

In this week’s sermon Pastor Eric gives a sermon “in character” as Moshe, or Moses, and offers a contemporary take on the biblical Exodus story. Moshe explains the difficult transition from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the wilderness, focusing on the people's anxiety and subsequent longing for the perceived security of enslavement. He emphasizes that true liberation is mental and spiritual, not...

The sermon emphasizes the enduring and revolutionary nature of the Exodus story in both Jewish and African-American traditions. It explores the Jewish custom of using the Haggadah during the Passover Seder to make the journey from slavery to freedom a present experience, suggesting that history and time collapse during the ritual. Pastor Eric explains that the Exodus is a "north star" th...

In this sermon, Pastor Eric reflects on the story of God calling Moses to act as God’s representative in the world. In doing so, God calls Moses from the comfort of his privilege and security to risk returning to his kin in Egypt who are suffering under pharaoh’s brutal rule. As they cry out for deliverance, God chooses to act—to liberate them by partnering with ordinary, complicated, wounded peop...

This week’s sermon explores the story of the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah, who defied Pharaoh's orders to kill newborn Hebrew boys, and connects it to Jesus's compassion and the role of community in nurturing life. Pastor Eric emphasizes the importance of being "midwives" in today's world, actively participating in bringing forth new life and hope amidst chaos and injustice, rather than being...

Pastor Eric invites us to imagine what the world might look like fifty years from now, and to hold it alongside God's dream--our hope--for what the world would look like. How do we bridge that divide? Listen in and reflect with us.

This is the second installment of our annual "Ask Me Anything" series where Pastor Eric answers the questions that are most on people's hearts and minds. The questions were submitted anonymously and then drawn from a bowl during the "sermon" time. Listen in and hear what people asked and how Pastor Eric responded!

In this final message in our series exploring sabbath rest, Pastor Eric challenges us to consider the ways that our common wisdom of "self-care" fails to adequately respond to the magnitude of the crises in our lives and world. Instead, he calls us to imagine and live into an ethic of "community care." As much as it feels safer to try and heal alone--what with all the frustrati...

In this message, Pastor Eric continues reflecting on the meaning of sabbath and both its challenge and transformational power for our lives and world. In particular, he calls us to reflect on how the lack of sabbath, of deep rest that actually restores us, de-humanizes us--cuts us off from core parts of what it means to be human: to give space to our grief or anger, our joy and gratitude, to cry,...

In this message, Pastor Eric reflects on the enduring--and liberating--challenge of "practicing the sabbath." From the debates Jesus had in his own time to our own struggles with exhaustion and burnout, Pastor Eric reflects on his sabbatical and how sabbath invites both a new vision of our world and calls us to inhabit it differently. At the core of this vision is the reminder that you are human;...

In this message, Pastor Eric continues reflecting on resurrection. In Christian faith, Easter is not merely a day, but a season; and resurrection is not merely an event we remember, but a reality we are called to participate in. Listen in as Pastor Eric invites us to go beyond merely "believing" in the resurrection to living it with our whole lives. This seemingly small shift makes a wor...

In this Easter message, Pastor Eric concludes our Lenten sermon series exploring how to live an integrated and whole life beyond simplistic binaries and dichotomies by reflecting on grief AND hope. With this reframing, we realize that the first Easter began not with joy, but grief; not with hope, but despair. In fact, it was only in moving toward the site of their grief--Jesus's tomb--that the...

In this Palm Sunday message, Pastor Eric explores themes of "silence" and "shouting" in Jesus' dramatic entrance into Jerusalem for the Passover festival celebrating their ancestor's liberation from bondage in Egypt, and his disruptive actions immediately afterward in the Temple. Often missed is how intentional, deliberate, and organized his actions were; Jesus is engaged in street theater, in a p...

In this sermon, Pastor Eric continues our Lenten series exploring binaries that our world often divides the world into and pushes us to choose between. This week, we explore "Righteousness" (and, similarly, justice) vs. "mercy."Rather than seeing these as opposites, in this story, Jesus calls us to pursue mercy as the pathway to building a world of justice and righteousness. If...

In this message, Pastor Eric explores the dichotomy of “lost” vs. “found.” How often does our world separate out those who are "in" as "found," and those who are not as "lost." And how often, we then give these a value: to be lost is "bad"--and one who is lost is somehow deficient--and to be found is "good," as is the one who is found. But what if...

In this Lenten message, Pastor Eric explores the tensions we often feel around the dichotomy of "rest" vs. "growth." So often, rest is seen as the opposite of growth, and we value rest only inasmuch as it enables us to get back to work. Through the Parable of the Fig Tree, this message explores how this dichotomy makes us feel guilt for resting and keeps us from allowing oursel...