JR.'s Sermons

Traditions are a beloved part of our Christmas celebrations – from lights and trees to Santa and gift-giving. Changes to holiday traditions can be hard, but change is the one constant of the Christmas story. How can we find Christ present in the center of our traditions, no matter what they look like this year?

Who doesn't love Christmas lights? Light is one of the central images of the Christmas season, but sometimes we forget what the light points to: that the darkness of sin is coming to an end. That God is up to something new. That WE are called to be that light in the world! As we prepare for Christmas, what does it look like for us to shine the light of God's hope into the world?

How does our preparation for the Christmas season cause us to miss Christ? Often, our lives become cluttered with busyness and sin that keep us from seeing the God who comes to us at Christmas. Both Isaiah and John the Baptist invite us to prepare a path for God in our lives. They insist a call to repent is a comfort for us! How is repentance a sign of God’s comfort during a busy holiday season?

How often in our preparations for Christmas do we forget to prepare ourselves for the coming of Christ? While the prophet Isaiah prays that God will tear open the heavens and come to us, Jesus instead comes humbly, in ways we least expect. How can we be alert and attentive this Advent season so we don't miss when Jesus comes among us?

In times of trauma and grief, it feels like all the structures that keep our lives stable have been stripped away. But as we enter into the process of Lament, those structures begin to reemerge. It’s not daylight yet, but we can begin to sense that the long night of our grief is ending. Hope draws us together and invites those voices who have long been silenced to be front and center.

When do we stop praying for healing? What does solidarity look like with those who are hurting? Artist and theologian Katie Fisher shares from Lamentations 3. Putting dust in our mouths is at once an act of solidarity and a declaration of hope.

What does it look like when God gets angry at us? Lamentations illustrates that God's anger is God giving us what we want - life apart from God. How can we learn to see God's anger as an aspect of God's love - and an invitation to life?

Grief is uncomfortable. In the face of tragedy, no words are sufficient to salve our pain. Yet in the face of others’ pain, we find ourselves offering platitudes and speaking for God so we can avoid their pain. But Lamentations 1 is a funeral dirge. We hear the woman’s honest, unflinching cries of pain and see the prophet join her, offering nothing but his presence. How can we learn to be honest a...

We avoid pain and grief as much as possible. When faced with someone else's grief, we avoid or offer platitudes. But the book of Lamentations invites us to sit with grief, to enter into the prophetic process of Lament. In this series, we'll explore how to grieve and how to be a friend to the grieving. Ultimately, we'll see how the process of lament invites us to be agents of healing in the larger...

We struggle to offer grace to people we feel don’t deserve it – which is, ironically, exactly who needs grace. Uncovering the true biblical origins of Satan helps us come face to face with this graceless impulse. It turns out, refusing to extend grace to others is what makes us truly Satanic. How can we choose to be a grace-filled people?

We tend to end up in echo chambers, surrounded by people who look and think a lot like us. The danger of this is that we don’t learn how to be challenged. The spiritual consequence is that we end up missing God – imagining God in our own image rather than learning to let God challenge us. Judas illustrates the reason we need to learn to be vulnerable, to open ourselves to strange friendships.

We work to strike a healthy balance between faith, family, work and all the other elements of our lives. But Jezebel's story shows us that God doesn't ask for balance; God asks for allegiance. How can we seek God first - and why is that good for everything else in our lives?

How do you resolve conflict? Chances are, however you approach a fight, you learned it from your family. Our families shape us for good and for ill. Herodias, the Evil Queen of Jesus’ day, illustrates for us the cost of generational sin. How can we overcome the sins we inherit from our families? And how can we leave a legacy of life for those who come after us?

What does it look like for Christians to be different from the world? Too often, we treat religion as a brand – one more optional lifestyle for people to choose from. But the story of Delilah and Samson illustrates how following God’s counter-cultural way becomes an invitation for those outside the Church – and life for us, too.

What makes you angry? We seldom stop to think about the cause of our anger - particularly whether that cause is justified or not. But we learn from the story of Cain, the first murderer, that anger can be an invitation to slow down and find life before we lash out and do something we'll regret.

If we know the end of the story, we know how to live in the middle. We conclude our series on the Apostle's Creed by exploring how each of the statements in the Creed shape us. How do they help us live now as a people who will live with God forever? How can we begin now reverse engineering our lives to flourish as God intended?

How we think about the afterlife shapes how we live today. Christians confess we believe our bodies will be raised. What implications does this have for how we live in the here and now? What does this mean for how we treat the world and each other?

Forgiveness is difficult – both as an internal experience and as an external movement to restore the social relationship that’s been broken. But to be the Church is to insist on forgiveness as essential to a fully human life. The journey of forgiveness is fueled by confession – an honest accounting of where we are before God. What does it take for us to be a people who insists on forgiveness?

What does it mean to be a Church? Church isn't a building - it's the people of God, all over the world and across time. How do we be part of the Church? When we find our place as part of the universal, worldwide church it grounds us in how we can be a source of life and hope for our immediate community.

We’re deeply skeptical that people can ever really change. But God promised to make us into new creations. The Holy Spirit is the one who transforms us, who brings real and lasting change. A church who believes in the Holy Spirit is a church that holds space for people to encounter the Spirit. We trust and celebrate as the Spirit brings new life.

'Apocalypse' is a scary word - it conjures images of death and destruction at the end of the world. But the Church has long anticipated Jesus' return as Good News. How can we understand Jesus' return such that it helps us understand how we can live today?

Too often, religion is about a new program - seven steps to a deeper faith or four tips to transform your marriage. But the reason Jesus came to earth was because we can't improve ourselves. We're lost under the power of sin. The good news is that his resurrection offers us something better than self-improvement. We have been given the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. How can we learn to wai...

Fear keeps us from risking, from being vulnerable. But confessing that Jesus descended to Hell is an announcement that the power of Death is broken, and that the way of risk and vulnerability truly does lead to life. We can follow Jesus even to the grave, trusting in his resurrection power to bring life where we risk.

When we fail, we want to shrug our shoulders and insist we're 'only human'. Human means limited, doomed to let people down. But Jesus' incarnation invites us to consider that we might be meant for more than we could've imagined.

Awe: we've all experienced it. Those moments under the stars when time slows down. The joy of a child's love. Moments when the sacred seems to burst into our everyday lives. These moments are Jesus, God's Son, inviting us to join in God's life. They're good for us, and we should seek them out more often. How can we find that life?