First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo

The Book of Esther: God is not mentioned in the Book of Esther. Are we intended to understand that God was involved - that God was a character ion this story, even thought never mentioned? How do we detect God's action and comprehend God's intention when, as someone put it, "God is subtle to a fault?" Borrowing from author Frederick Buechner, we trust that God offers the possib...

Mark 9:30-37: The disciples are afraid to ask Jesus what he meant when they didn't understand his prediction about betrayal, death and resurrection. They're worried about their image, as is revealed by their subsequent bickering about being the greatest. Jesus shows them a child, vulnerable, with no status, and identifies with the child: those who are great will welcome the vulnerable. I...

Mark 7:25-37: Jesus learned from listening to the religious and ethnic "other." So can we.

Jeremiah 29:4-7, 10-11: This sermon concludes the summer sermon series on the ways we are created for community. Jeremiah told the exiles to Babylon to make a life there, and to pray for the city in which they found themselves, for in its welfare was their welfare. The American church is not in exile, but can feel at odds with the culture. Our mission statement is to seek the welfare of the city,...

Leviticus 19:15-18, Luke 10:25-37: People often assume that the lesson of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is "Anybody could be my neighbor," which is comfortable and doesn't raise our prejudices. But Jesus chose the Samaritan precisely because "A Samaritan is my neighbor" would have stuck in the throats of his listeners. Jesus chose the despised outcast and heretic as th...

Ephesians 4:25-5:2: In a list of ethical instructions about how to live the new life in Christ, the writer acknowledges that feeling anger is not a problem; what we DO with our anger is the issue. Anger alerts us to unfairness, and is a valuable tool when transformed to courage, love, or justice.

Ephesians 4:1-16: In the face of a threat to unity, which is the goal and measure of Christian maturity, the writer's advice to the churches to "speak the truth in love." This is a calling to pursue the truth, even if it is painful, we don't like the source, or it requires us to change. It is also a calling to speak it, to voice the truth, but "in love," which means g...

July 29, 2018 sermon on lectionary texts Psalm 14 and Gospel of John 6.1-21

Often churches speak of unity as agreement – a calm and comforting sense that we all get along – that there’s no real difference or dispute – no controversy, no disagreement, no protest. But that works well only if you are in the majority. Whenever there is any power imbalance – which is always – thinking about unity-as-agreement only works for our places of power and privilege – where the status...

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a: Paul uses the metaphor of the human body to explain how God's gift to the Church is that people have a variety of skills, gifts and talents to bring to the ministry in Christ's name. He uses the same metaphor to explain how the church are bound together, suffering when one of us suffers and rejoicing when one of us is honored. The challenge in our culture id not...

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Mark 4:35-43; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13: Mark's story about Jesus' calming the storm shows us how to move from fear to trusting God. Jesus reveals a God who cares passionately for the wellbeing of all God’s people. Jesus invites people to trust in that God, and trust, in the end, is the only thing that overcomes fear. Ultimately, the question isn’t what moves us from fear to trust, but who. T...

Acts 1:1-11; Daniel 1:1-17; “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” the poem by James Weldon Johnson Guest preacher the Rev. Floyd Thompkins, Director of the Center for Innovation in Ministry at San Francisco Theological Seminary, looks at the story describing Daniel's invitation to compromise his beliefs and his integrity in order to be seen as successful and important, as defined by the king and the d...

Matthew 11:28-30; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26: Three of the church leaders who served in key leadership roles in the congregation's REST program [Rotating Emergency Shelter Team] over the 9 year course of the ministry to people experiencing homelessness in Marin County reflect on their experiences.

Acts 8:26-40: Philip converts the Ethiopian Eunuch - but it's Philip who is the one converted. The church needs the stranger, the foreigner, the "other" to convert us again and again to the open-hearted and ever-widening circle of faith in Jesus Christ, and to show us what the church can be.

Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24: "I shall not want" doesn't mean we'll have no desires. It means God provides all we need. God provides enough to sustain all life on the planet. The problem is not supply, but distribution. If we trust that "the Lord is our shepherd," as the psalmist proclaims, rather than greed or consumerism, we will trust that there is enough to share, eno...

John 21:1-14: Interns Molly Morris and John Lyzenga describe the hospitality modeled by Jesus in this post-resurrection appearance, when he invites the disciples to join him for breakfast on the beach. Jesus always welcomed the stranger, and that is our calling as well. Even if, as is sometimes the case, the stranger we need to welcome is someone who looks like the person who hurt or excluded us.

John 20:19-34: This work of fiction serves as the "sermon" on Holy Humor Sunday, culminating a Lenten and Easter series on spiritual practices. In her search for a spiritual practice that fits her, the main character, Jenna, discovers that humor and laughter may be her spiritual practices, healing her when she hurts and fueling her to walk the walk. In the process, she realizes that her...

John 20:1-18: When John talks about "believing" in the Resurrection, he is talking about relying on it, trusting it, as though our lives depended on it. There are many paths to "believing" or trusting, as John, Mary and the beloved disciple show us. One path is practicing resurrection, because as Henri Nouwen said, “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live y...

Guest preacher the Rev. Sue Fleenor shared her experience on El Camino de Santiago de Compostela and compared her journey to the journey of faith and the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem that ended on Palm Sunday.

Psalm 25:1-10, Luke 10:25-37: Part of our Lenten sermon series, "Breathe on Me, Breath of God, on faith practices that sustain our faith during turbulent times, Molly Morris, Director of Family Ministries and seminary intern looks at the practice of storytelling. Our stories are part of us and a huge part of the way we interpret the world. When we tell our stories and listen to others' s...

Genesis 1:1-12; Mark 1:9-15: Jesus emerged from his journey into the wilderness of nature, a form of vision quest during which he wrestled with his calling and self-definition, with the conviction that we need to move toward what he called "the kingdom of God," based in the old biblical stories that God created us in love and desires us to be free. The mirror of nature helped Jesus to se...

This sermon on Amos 5 and Psalm 10 explores communal lament as a faith practice. In scripture, lament is the response to recognizing and confessing that God's people are participants in a broken system or culture.

Mark 9:2-9: In the story of the Transfiguration, God tells the disciples to listen to Jesus, and offers a miraculous, supernatural event to underscore who Jesus is. While we may not see many occurrences as flashy as the one Mark describes, we are surrounded by "supernatural" occurrences in which God invites us to hear, see and notice God. We have only to pay attention. During Lent, we wi...

Mark 1:29-39: Jesus needed time alone to pray. He needed to spend good, quality, one-on-one time with God in order to keep doing what God called him to do, and to keep being what God called him to be. So do we.