Mosaic UMC Sermons

Guest preacher Craig Rikard reads Luke 17:11-19, where ten lepers are cleansed along the hostile border between Samaria and Galilee and only one, a Samaritan, returns to throw himself at the feet of Jesus in thanks. Pairing that story with the memorial stones Israel carried out of the Jordan in Joshua 4, the sermon pictures life under the purity laws of Moses and the shared leper colony where Jews...

On All Saints Sunday, 1 John 3:1-3 is read with fresh attention to its plural pronoun, noticing that the Father's lavish love makes people children of God together, so that no one becomes a Christian in a vacuum. Congregation members share testimonies about the band directors, Sunday school teachers, spouses, and parents who discipled them, a living picture of a lineage of faith that reaches back...

In Acts 8, an angel sends Philip down the wilderness road to Gaza, where he runs up to the chariot of an Ethiopian eunuch, the queen's treasurer, who is reading Isaiah and asking who the prophet is talking about. Every excuse is on the table, from race and politics to gender and the law of Deuteronomy, and the Spirit leads Philip to sit down, share the good news, and baptize him anyway, while Isai...

In Acts 10, God sends Peter a blanket full of foods he has never been allowed to eat and tells him not to call anything impure that God has made clean, and while Peter is still preaching in the house of a godly Roman centurion named Cornelius, the Holy Spirit falls on everyone listening. The promise to Abraham that all peoples on earth will be blessed through him reveals why God set his people apa...

In Acts 8, Philip carries the gospel to Samaria, where Simon the sorcerer, a man who once held the whole city in awe, believes and is baptized, and then tries to buy the Spirit from Peter and John. I wonder if both stories about Simon are a little bit true, that he was a sincere convert who didn't have his act together yet, and that Peter was still wrestling with a lifetime of assumptions about Sa...

When Peter and John are hauled before the rulers, elders, and scribes in Acts 4:5-12, Luke names the gatekeepers one by one, and then Peter answers their question about whose name did this with a single Name. We talk about how Jesus never gatekept who could follow him, why the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, and how Christ holds a Matthew and a Simon together in unity witho...

In Matthew 21:23-32, Jesus tells the religious leaders a parable about two sons — one who says no to his father and then goes to work, and one who says yes and never shows up. This week we sit with the parts of that story that don't resolve easily: what it means that Jesus never says the tax collectors and prostitutes changed their lives, why there's no option for the son who says yes and does the...

In Matthew 20:1-16, Jesus tells a parable about a vineyard owner who pays every worker the same wage, whether they showed up at dawn or five in the afternoon, and asks us to sit with how unfair that feels before we rush to the moral. We talk about why comparison is the thief of joy, how it keeps us focused on what we don't have and on ourselves instead of the kingdom, and what it looks like to tru...

In this week's devotion, we look at how we got to the place we are in AI, the anxiety in the world surrounding it, and how we can look to God in the midst of all of it.

Matthew 18:21-35 gives us Peter's question about how many times we're supposed to forgive, and Jesus answers with a parable about a servant forgiven an impossible debt who turns around and chokes a fellow servant over pocket change. Forgiveness gets talked about with a lot of Sunday school answers, so this week we tried to get honest about what forgiveness actually is and isn't: it isn't reconcili...

When Jesus tells us that whoever loses their life will save it, sometimes we try and have it both ways.

Jesus tells a story about a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to chase down one lost one, and if that sounds backwards, that's the point: in the economy of God, the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many, because the many are just a whole lot of ones that God loves individually. We dig into Luke 15 and ask an uncomfortable question about why Jesus ate with sinners in the first place,...

This week we welcome guest speaker Tab Miller, Director of Operations and Volunteer Ministries at FaithWorks in Brunswick, Georgia. Preaching from Matthew 5:13-16, Tab wrestles with what it means to be salt and light in communities marked by real poverty and real suffering, drawing on stories from the reservation and from FaithWorks' ministries among those experiencing homelessness. It's a sermon...

Jonah's message was well received Nineveh repented, but instead of celebrating he got angry that grace reached people he didn't think deserved it. This week we sat with that whine and asked how often we do the same thing, hoping for someone's downfall instead of their repentance, wanting God's mercy for ourselves but not for the people we've written off. The book ends without telling us what Jonah...

Jonah preached the harshest sermon imaginable, no mercy, no invitation to repent, just forty days and judgment, and somehow the whole city turned to God anyway. This week we sat with what it means that Nineveh believed God while Jonah, God's own prophet, only ever believed in him, and asked what the difference is between agreeing that God exists and actually trusting what he says. We don't need a...

Jonah's prayer from inside the fish sounds like faith, but it's really the cry of a man who's run out of every other option, and that's exactly the kind of prayer most of us know how to pray. This week we sat with the drowning feeling, whether it's depression, debt, broken relationships, or the fear of what's coming, and asked what it means that our best efforts can't save us but God still can. Th...

Jonah didn't run from a task, he ran from the people God asked him to love, and if we're honest, most of us have done the same thing. This week we started our new series in the book of Jonah, tracing how God met a disobedient prophet with grace upon grace upon grace, calling him, pursuing him, and rescuing him even after he ran. It's not an if/then faith where obedience earns blessing, it's a beca...

In this week's midweek devotion, we look at how the book of Jonah teaches against tribal religion, showing pagan sailors who are more virtuous than God's prophet.

It's one thing to sing about peace on Sunday night, and another thing when the notification pops up Monday morning and the study of war finds you. In Romans 12, Paul calls a church living in the shadow of empire to bless their persecutors, feed their enemies, and live at peace with everyone as far as it depends on them. In this final message of our Shalom series, we look at four postures Christian...

Paul and Silas end up beaten, shackled, and thrown into the darkest cell in Philippi, and they respond by singing. Tonight we dig into Acts 16 through the lens of Martin Buber's I-Thou philosophy, tracing how nearly everyone in this story treats someone else as an object, from the slave girl exploited for profit to the jailer ready to end his own life over a job. Paul's refusal to do the same, eve...

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had every reason to expect they were about to die, and they walked toward the furnace anyway rather than bow to a king's golden idol. Their story asks us what shalom actually means when the world gets chaotic, and the answer isn't safety or success but the presence of God with us in the fire itself. It's better to be in the furnace with Jesus than safe and comfortab...

In John 14 and 15, Jesus promises his disciples a peace unlike anything the world can offer, a Shalom rooted not in the absence of conflict but in wholeness, harmony, and the abiding presence of the Spirit. This peace is a gift we receive rather than a comfort we manufacture, and it often shows up as disruption to injustice rather than calm agreement with the way things are. Certified Lay Minister...

Jesus says "be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect," and it's tempting to hear that as an order to pitch a perfect game of morality, no errors allowed. Wesley taught something different, that Christian perfection isn't an unblemished record but a heart so shaped by walking with Jesus that love becomes our first instinct instead of our last resort. So this week we're asking ourse...

Could you live a holy life alone on a desert island, free from anyone to lie to, steal from, or be jealous of? John Wesley would say that's exactly the problem, because he believed there's no such thing as solitary religion, only social holiness, the kind that gets worked out in real relationships with real people. This week Matt walks through Wesley's two-part vision of social holiness, connectio...

Everybody in the Christian faith talks a big game about grace, but John Wesley meant something specific by it, and this week we dig into what grace actually is: God's free, undeserved favor poured out on everybody, all the time, no matter what. Walking through Wesley's vision of prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying grace in Ephesians 2, we see that grace was never the church's to ration out, an...