Mosaic Church of Clayton

"Why would someone choose to give us a perfectly good Sunday morning to be present in worship? Why would someone choose to be part of a community of believers, a kind of family that you don’t always like, don’t always get along with, don’t always agree with? Why would be part of anything that requires more from us with everything already pressing on us? "

Sermon preached on April 30, 2023 "Diana Butler Bass’s book, Christianity for the Rest of Us, says, “The whole message of the Christian scripture is based in the idea of metanoia, the change of heart that happens when we meet God face-to-face. Even a cursory knowledge of history reveals that Christianity is a religion about change. The Christian faith always changes-even when some its adherents cl...

This is a sermon preached on May 23, 2021. Due to sound issues it was never posted. In light of the recent decisions by The Southern Baptist Convention, we felt it was important to retrieve it and make sure it was available. If you are looking for another way of understanding what scripture says about women, this will be a great starting place. "Here are a few guiding principles when you are looki...

I heard a sermon recently by a national leader calling for unity, focusing on the ways we are alike. But the problem is that the ways we are different harm and belittle people groups that are on the margins and I believe that should be where we draw the line. We cannot hold up not speaking our mind, wanting to keep the peace for everything. Unity at the expense of health and humanity is dangerous....

The truth is that we are made in the image of God, just as we are. There are up sides and there are down sides to who we are. But all of that has been made free, has been blessed, is continuing to be reformed for the work of God in Christ. It is in Christ that we can experience freedom from the things that hold us back. It is in Christ that we are lovingly refined to be the better image of God in...

"And the words of Paul say that when we feel that pain, we need to lean into grace. Grace for ourselves and grace for other people. We are to be reminded that God has seen us right where we are. Right in the place of where we are lacking, right in the middle of our failures, right in the place of our pride, Jesus meets us there. The point is the grace. The point is Jesus.  Rachel Held Evans a...

This is an introduction to the sermon series about Romans. The title of the book I am using by JR Daniel Kirk for guidance says it all, "Romans for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Misused, Problematic and Prooftexted Letter in the Bible."

This honest sermon based on Matthew 3 is my (Rev. Dr Charity Roberson, pastor) story. It is how I grew up in a conservative Christian church but became a pastor and somehow found God different somewhere along the way. This is a word for all of those who feel they are not able to fully themselves or are not fully honored in their churches and where God is in all of that.

And then he goes on with kind of a group of mixed metaphors about the power of the tongue and talk. The bottom line he is getting at is that the words you say have the power to destroy or create. The words you put into the world can seem so innocent. You did not do anything, you just said something or maybe even hinted at something. If someone else chose to take action on your words, you can’t con...

The power gets the loudest voices. The poor, the people without the power are often treated like pawns in a game. And it is a game that we will never win. That is what James is saying here….don’t you get it. These power plays, these games we play to cater to the powerful to get more power to be protected ourselves will never end well. Power and money never find their way to trickle down to us.&nbs...

There are days where we feel like we are killing it. We are doing amazing. We are loving our neighbors, caring for our world, loving those closest to us well, and we feel the presence of God in our own lives. In these days it is easy to lose site of God’s presence with us because we can easily think we are doing it on our own. We deserve the things we have. We may just write off our mistakes becau...

We choose every day who we will follow. We choose who we will learn from. We can choose to fall into the stereotypes or believe the stereotypes. We can choose to think that anything other than God can save us. We can chase after the approval of someone who is well connected, has the look, has all the answers. Or we can think outside the box. We can find value in leaders and teachers who do not loo...

It is helpful to ask our selves if the way they talked about God is to be descriptive of God, or more descriptive of their understanding of God at the time. Remember the culture in which this was written. They really did believe that God, and other cultures around them, their gods, made everything happen. They did not have the science we do today. They had no other language. Now, do I believe that...

It takes courage to celebrate. But life without celebration is a life of just wandering around in the dessert, moving from one calamity to another. This morning, let’s grab the tambourines and celebrate. Let’s have the courage, this isn’t just kid stuff. While the world and life are so hard around us, let us engage in the spiritual discipline of laughing, feeling joy and celebrating what God has d...

Somewhere in the middle of Joseph’s story he recognized the presence of God with him. He recognized the presence of God working to make all things good, working to shape and mold him. It did not make the slavery, the prison, or the deceptions any less awful but it did allow them to have a different purpose. What his brothers meant for bad, what Potiphar’s wife meant for bad, what the cupbearers fo...

As humans we look for a lot of things to give us our identity and to help us feel secure, our blessing in this world. A position at work, a relationship, the next high grade, getting into the right school. We spend our lives chasing some sense of peace and purpose that God has been offering all along. We think, we would just achieve this next thing, all will be well. When this problem is resolved,...

But the truth is that life is a series of settling and unsettling. It is a cycle. There is illness, untimely death, a marriage falling apart, a child that makes choices you don’t agree with, a job market that drastically changes, families who have different opinions/ways of seeing the world that make it difficult to be in relationship. Abraham’s life was the same. The initial promise was go to the...

I grew up in a culture where if you didn’t believe in a literal creation of the earth in six days with a day of rest, you weren’t really Christian. In fact, we were trained to argue it in our schools….to not let that scientific education get the best of us. Now, I believe that God could have created the world in six days if God wanted to. But I do not believe that arguing that was ever the point....

Sermon from June 5, 2022 Together we commit to being present for each other. Present on Sunday mornings, present in life. We commit to remembering that we cannot do this alone. I believe today in our culture we have lost site of the fact that the work of God, the work of the spirit, the work of the local church gathered on a Sunday morning is not just one of the many options we have available to u...

It has been awhile since we have uploaded a sermon due to our expanding technology. This was an important one to start back. "In our little worlds we stand up to those who would harm or belittle or make fun of others because we know that each person is made in the image of God. In our own little worlds we stand up to racist jokes, to jokes about peoples appearances, to the vilification of women an...

"And if there was anywhere we should be able to fall apart it is at church. But somehow we have this belief that God expects us to be able to handle it all, to have it all figured out. We tried to brush away vulnerability and weakness maybe because of our pride, maybe because of something we learned along the way that God is only for the strong, there is not room for weakness and vulnerability in...

"And as we remember that there is room for everyone at the table, we need to look around and see who is not here. What people are we just not paying attention to, where is God moving outside of our normal ways of understanding him as we try to keep things neat and tidy? Life with Jesus is messy and the miracle, the love of Jesus cannot be contained.  When we have open hearts to engage, to lis...

Here is our teaching and sermonette for our Sunday focusing on enneagram twos, the helpers among us.

Enneagram ones are known as the fixers, the reformers and the perfectionists. Here is our teaching and sermonette from July 25 as we learned more from our enneagram ones.

This week we learn about enneagram nines and their desire for keeping the peace.