Roseville Covenant Sermons

I've been living in Minnesota for fourteen years now. In some ways those 14 years feel like they've gone by fast, but in other ways my old life back in Chicago feels like a very long time ago. Had someone made a promise to me when I first moved to Minnesota that hasn't yet come to pass, I imagine I'd be getting impatient by now. That seems to be what's happening in our scripture reading this week....

Good storytellers know that good stories are rarely a predictable series of events where a protagonist only ever makes the right decision. Good stories always have trials and setbacks where characters must fail and learn from loss. This isn't just true of fiction. This is true of life in general; especially the spiritual life. Our journey from sin to salvation is always going to be a complicated o...

Even the most introverted of us probably know the pain of "not being invited" to a party. It's hard to get through life without feeling left out at some point. Exclusive groups are common to human nature as we tend to gather with people most like us. But just because something is biologically or sociologically "natural" does not make it entirely good. The gospel often prods us to move beyond our n...

A local church may often describe itself as a, "spiritual family". It's an appropriate biblical term. The Christians of the New Testament referred to themselves as brothers and sisters. In a world that suffers a lot of loneliness and isolation we might think the image of spiritual family is an inviting one, but many of us know that family life often comes with a lot of pain. Just like biological f...

The Christian life is one of becoming a disciple of Jesus. Sometimes we think becoming a Christian is relegated to a conversion moment or praying a certain prayer that eventually leads to becoming a disciple. But what if it is more about learning to follow Jesus in our everyday lives?  When Jesus calls the first disciples, he simply says “follow me”, and they do. We are not told if this is a conve...

Sometime in the late 6th century BC, a young Jewish priest and mystic had a vision: a valley full of skeletons (victims of a deadly conquest) lay before him and a voice asked him, "Can these bones live, o mortal?" The prophet replies, "only you know!" (Ezekiel 37:1-3). 500 years later the first Christians believed God had an answer to the question when he raised Jesus from the dead, and then procl...

In my house we often call laundry, "the never ending chore". With five people who are prone to get dirty, it seems never more than a day goes by before we need to start a new load or fold another pile. If the question is, "when is the laundry chore done?" The answer will be something like, "when we stop needing to wear clothes!"  Jesus once said, "be prepared to forgive seven times a day!" (Luke 1...

When I was a teenager, I used to do a lot of babysitting. It often felt like an exercise in administering nurture and care, reminding kids of what their parents said, and generally maintaining orderly conduct until mom and dad returned. In a not entirely parallel way, we hear Jesus in John’s gospel telling his disciples, that he is going away, but will not leave them as orphans, but that he will l...

About 65% of Americans describe their religion as “Christian” but less than half of those belong to a congregation or regularly attend worship services. This tells us maybe the hardest thing to believe about Christianity is not so much that Jesus was born of a virgin or that he  rose from the dead, but that God has instituted, “the holy catholic church, the communion of saints.”  Here in the 8th w...

Under the American system of criminal justice, a trial judge is not usually the one responsible to determine guilt or innocence (that's the jury's job), but a judge does hand down sentencing and punishments. There might be merits to this system within a democracy, but it has the potential to create confusion for readers of the Bible when we describe God as "Judge". In some ways, Biblical judgement...

This Sunday is the fourth week of our summer sermon series on the Apostles' Creed and we arrive at one of the more controversial phrases in the creed confessing that Jesus, "descended into Hades" (or sometimes it's rendered, "descended into hell"). These words provoke a lot of confusion and it's not unheard of for some churches to skip that line when they recite the creed! I can understand the tem...

Despite the fact that the Greeks and the Romans used crucifixion on thousands of criminals and insurgents, the Romans rarely wrote about crucifixion and crosses appear almost nowhere in Greco-Roman sculpture, painting, or mosaics. Why? The cross was one of the most sordid, disturbing, and taboo objects in antiquity. It was the most humiliating and degrading experience in the culture of the ancient...

Christian faith suggests there is a most important question upon which all life and history hangs, "who is Jesus Christ?" If he is indeed Lord of all, then knowing him might be the most important work we do in our lives. In a climactic moment in the final book of the Bible, the prophet John had a vision that continues to provoke us to know who Jesus is. A voice describes Jesus as, "the Lion of Jud...

In the centuries that followed the New Testament, the Christian church grew like wildfire across the Mediterranean world. The good new of Jesus transformed lives and communities in profound ways, but as the church grew, there was a persistent point of contention and debate in Christian theology: who exactly is Jesus of Nazareth and how do we describewho he is? What does it mean to call him "the So...

At the risk of over-simplifying things, there are two great misconceptions about Christian faith: Some misperceive Christianity to be just a system of morals (e.g. doing good, being nice) while others will misconceive Christianity as simply a system of doctrine and dogma where one just checks off boxes of right options. Christian life is more than both of these. Christian life includes both belief...

Recent decades of brain research has discovered something fascinating: learning a new language can literally rewire your neural pathways. Language is elemental to our thoughts. How we speak influences how we think. So while smart-phones might offer new tools for instant translation, communicating across different languages can still leave us struggling to understand one another. On a biological an...

Unjust imprisonment is a frequent prompt of great works of literature. Think of classics like The Count of Monte Cristo, the works of Dostoyevsky, or even the novels of Stephen King. Wrongful incarceration is not just a tool for compelling storytelling, it is an all too common reality for those who live under totalitarian regimes (even in our own country this is not fantasy or fiction). Sometimes...

Memorial Day weekend is Minnesota's official start of summer. Many of us like to celebrate with cabin trips, grill outs, or hikes after our long Minnesota winter and spring. But, Memorial Day is really about remembering, memorializing, those who have died in service to our country. We are grateful for those sacrifices that have allowed us to become the country we are --- one where, in many ways, w...

The world is changing quickly. More so every day. A person who starts high school next fall may find the world a totally different place in 4 years when they graduate. The cultural, social, and technological transformations are enough to make your headspin. Yet there remain traditions that endure and are handed from generation to generation. For two thousand years, followers of Christ have "handed...

There was a motto that used to circulate among tech moguls back at the dawn of the 21st century. To spur innovation and accelerate growth, developers and entrepreneurs were encouraged to, ‘move fast and break things." When you think of the ways technology has transformed the world over the last 25 years, it's tempting to see the appeal of the method.  But is what worked for Google good for the chu...

A sense of fairness and justice lies at the heart of what it means to be a human being. Scripture tells us human beings are created in the image of God and worthy of fair treatment. Children are especially good at noticing when they have been treated unfairly — just try refereeing an Easter egg hunt! Most of us have a pretty good instinct to speak up when we've been overcharged, denied something d...

There is a phrase we often use when tragedy strikes. Whether it's suffering an injustice, grieving a death, or experiencing a betrayal; I will often hear a person describe the feeling this way, "my world fell apart." It's an apt phrase. We live our lives with a certain set of expectations that the world should work with a certain amount of order. We count on a certain amount of predictability. Wor...

A meditation for Palm/Passion Sunday on the suffering of Christ, faith, hope, and love.

About mid-way through the gospel of Mark, we read a story about Jesus that feels strangely out of character. After many chapters of documenting Jesus' compassionate care and healing for many people, Jesus is approached by a foreign woman with a request to help her daughter.  Shockingly, it first looks like he refuses to help her and then even seems to refer to her as a  dog  (Mark 7:24-27). When d...

Idioms can be a fun form of speech used to exaggerate a response. For example, if a friend shares an outrageous account of something that sounds almost unbelievable, you might say “Yeah, right! When pigs fly!” Well, our story in Mark’s gospel is exactly this kind of account. It is outrageous and certainly presses against all kinds of things we believe, and in the end, some pigs actually fly right...