Palms Presbyterian Sermons

New Life (Part 5) Ephesians 4:1-6, 25 - 5:2 Sunday, May 12, 2024 Very early in its history, the Christian church comes to understand that it has been placed under the call of God. Language once reserved for prophets and kings is now applied to all who would follow in Jesus' footsteps—to all who would walk in newness of life. New life in Christ entails a new purpose, a new calling, a new direction...

New Life (Part 4) Jeremiah 31:31-34 & 1 Peter 2:1-10 Sunday, May 5, 2024 Our new life in Christ is not lived alone, it is lived in community. More than that, community itself takes on a new shape and a new identity because of what happened on Easter. Can the church embody this new life together in a world that is so quickly forgetting how to nurture the bonds of community? Bryant Anderson prea...

New Life (Part 3) Luke 24:13-31 Sunday, April 28, 2024 One thing we can't do after Easter is look at the world in the same way. Before Easter, the shadow of death—an unstoppable force that stops life in its tracks—hangs over everything. But on Easter the shadow is lifted and all of life takes on a different hue. With new life comes an entirely new way of seeing the world, its ills, and its extraor...

New Life (Part 2) Colossian 3:1-17 Sunday, April 21, 2024 We're asking the question of what it means to have new life in Christ, and it may seem a bit simplistic to say that it means we have been called to a new way of life. But there's nothing simple about changing the way we live. There's nothing easy or straightforward about changing course and following a new path. But this is the transformati...

New Life (Part 1) Jeremiah 29:1, 4-14 & Hebrews 6:10-20 Sunday, April 14, 2024 The hope that we have in Christ is not merely wish casting or positive thinking. This Easter hope grows out of the knowledge that God has a plan for us and for this world, and it transforms our experience of even the most difficult challenges. Beverly Dempsey preaching. Referenced in this sermon: Karen Armstrong, Th...

Easter Sunday Matthew 28:1-10 Sunday, March 31, 2024 Easter is a story of expectations radically altered. Women went to the tomb with clear expectations of what they would find there, founded upon the bedrock certainty that dead people stay dead. They went expecting to find death and found life instead. We often go through our days expecting to find death, but Easter reminds us that life is always...

The Greatest Commandments (Part 5) Matthew 5:43-48 Sunday, March 24, 2024 Jesus commands a very special kind of love: love for those who can't (or won't) return the favor. His reason? This is how God loves. But this is an unbelievably difficult sort of love for us to live out in practice. People can be so hard to understand—and even harder to love—especially when they see the world differently tha...

The Greatest Commandments (Part 4) Romans 12:1-2 Sunday, March 17, 2024 God created us with physical bodies to inhabit a physical world. It cannot possibly be the case that our love of God resides solely in the invisible spaces within and does not extend to how we make use of our physicality. We are commanded to love God with—among other things—all of our strength. How does love find its embodied...

Guest preacher Dr. Andrew Root Sunday, March 10, 2024 Andrew Root (Ph. D., Princeton Theological Seminary) is the Carrie Olson Baalson professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and joins Palms Presbyterian as our visiting theologian for the weekend. Dr. Root writes and researches in areas of theology, ministry, culture and younger generations.  His most...

The Greatest Commandments (Part 3) Philippians 4:4-8 March 3, 2024 To love the Lord with all our mind entails making the important choice of where we will direct our focus. Bill Wildey preaching.

The Greatest Commandments (Part 2) Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18 February 25, 2024 We have a very muddled concept of the soul. We might imagine it as our spiritual essence, our core identity, or as something rendered totally irrelevant by modern advances in biology and neuroscience. Regardless of our view, it is not entirely clear what it means to use our soul to love God. Taking a careful look at our natu...

The Greatest Commandments (Part 1) Isaiah 44:9-20 Sunday, February 18, 2024 In the Bible, the heart has directionality: we point our hearts at the object(s) of our love and devotion. This is the meaning of worship and it is also the meaning of idolatry, the only difference being the nature of the object toward which our hearts are directed. When our hearts are divided and our loves misdirected, we...

Losing My Religion (Part 6) Galatians 5:22 - 6:10 The point of religion is not to make us more religious, it is to make us fruitful. Which is to say, the point of religion is to lead us toward bearing the fruit of the Spirit in the world: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, patience, gentleness, and self-control. If we're not bearing good fruit, we're missing the point. Bryant Anders...

Losing My Religion (Part 5) Galatians 5:1-15 Sunday, February 4, 2024 What the Galatians don't seem to grasp is that in Christ they have been offered freedom. Despite this gift, they seem intent upon remaining captive to their old worldview. Freedom can be frightening when it means setting aside things that bring us comfort and clarity. But a new kind of freedom is on offer in Christ—the kind of f...

Losing My Religion (Part 4) Galatians 3:19-29 The law once provided the comfort of clarity: it drew clear boundaries around God's people and gave concrete instructions for faithfulness. Paul speaks of this clarity as a kind of prison, something which stifles faith and closes us off from life. The good news is that in Christ we have been set free from that prison. The bad news, however, is that we...

Losing My Religion (Part 3) Galatians 3:1-14 Sunday, January 21, 2024 It is in our nature to try to preserve good things—to guard them so that we can feel certain that they will endure. But there are things which simply cannot be possessed; things which, if they are to have any hope of lasting, must be shared. Paul reminds the church that the blessing of God—long imagined to be the church's birthr...

Losing My Religion (Part 2) Galatians 2:11-21 Sunday, January 14, 2024 We don't change easily. The gravitational pull of our "old ways" is incredibly strong. Paul is trying to convince the Galatians that something central has changed for them in Christ, but they keep wanting to layer Christ right overtop of their old ideas and practices and call that faithfulness. But Paul wants them—and us—to kno...

Losing My Religion (Part 1) Galatians 1:1-12 Sunday, January 7, 2024 Paul has a very clear purpose in writing this particular letter to the Christian community in Galatia: they have drifted away from the gospel. Their religious background proves to be a hindrance to their ability to accept the good news that Paul has tried to share with them. In short, if they want to embrace the gospel, they migh...