Pastor Taylor Shippy's Sermons

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Luke 24:1-34 - Easter Sunday 2024 So often we have this tendency to rush Easter, to get to the ‘good’ part, the ‘happily ever after;' however, the Gospels are not so quick to jump ahead. They linger. Stubbornly. Content to take it at a much slower pace, and as a result, force us to sit in the tension and unease and discomfort and pain of how frigid that first Easter morn...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Matthew 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45; Colossians 1:19-22; Hebrews 10:19-23 Good Friday 2024

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Luke 19:28-40 On the precipice of Jesus ushering in the new Creation in a one week’s time… On this Palm Sunday morning... Consider Church that God has been partnering with humans, not as slaves but as friends, to work with Him in rehabilitating and redeeming all of Creation. God doesn’t want to do this creative endeavor alone. He wants to collaborate with us. Partner with us...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Luke 19:11-27 There’s a great deal of excitement in the air this morning. You could practically also taste it. Everyone. On the edge of their seat. Eagerly anticipating what’s gonna happen when they reach where they’re going. Especially given the season they’re in! They're all asking the same question: "Is the ‘Kingdom’ gonna begin right when they get to Jerusalem?&...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Luke 13:18-30 Jesus was known to also use object lessons. We often call them parables. These earthly stories with heavenly meanings. They’d often incorporate common household items Jesus’ listeners were familiar with. Things from their gardens and kitchens and so on… Now what tends to happen is one of the two things: Either folks don’t always understand Jesus’ object lessons...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Luke 9:51-62 “The world behind me, the cross before me; no turning back…” That’s Jesus’ mentality going into our reading this morning, along with the reminder of Luke’s Gospel. The momentum has taken a cosmic shift. The continental divide of the narrative is slanted perpetually towards one fixed point: Jerusalem. Where a cross awaits Jesus. All roads now lead to that ancient...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - John 12:1-8 I think Mary washing Jesus' feet exemplifies or symbolizes a spiritual practice we can do during the upcoming season of Lent. Traditionally, the season of Lent has been marked by incorporating fasting (or the giving up of something or the abstinence from something for the purposes of spiritual formation). And just like Mary, I want to invite you to practice L...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - John 6:1-14 Whenever we hand over whatever it is we got, Jesus is capable of taking that, blessing it, and multiplying it to nourish and sustain and help people greater than we could ever imagine… Whether that be multiple people or perhaps a single individual in multiple ways… Whatever our loaves and fish might be is capable, in the hands of Jesus, is capable of being multip...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - John 1:35-42 Beauty was in the eye of a different sorta Beholder in our text. He takes one look at a different kind of ‘rock,’ and He sees a masterpiece! Jesus isn’t simply giving one of the friends He’ll pal around with a funny sounding nickname. No despite Simon’s frailty, his nickname signals Jesus’ vision for what Simon will become. Peter. The Apostle Paul told the Ephes...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Genesis 2:4-9, 15-25 I believe in the opening chapters of Genesis we are given the ingredients, clues and hints, to what it means to be fully alive as God intended. We’re told the story of how the Creator God originally ‘fearfully and wonderfully’ (cf. Ps 139:14) made humankind but also how He not only made us but brought us to life… That God knew (and still knows) precisely...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - 2 Samuel 11:1-27; Matthew 1:1-6 We’ve been talking the last few Sundays about Matthew’s genealogy, or his family tree of Jesus. Matthew has curated his genealogy to stress one major thing about Jesus: His messianic identity (cf. Isa 9:7, Matt 1:1, 16; 16:16). That He is indeed the ‘son of David,' the long-awaited heir to the throne of Israel. So one would expect Matthew...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Ruth 1:22-2:23; Matthew 1:1-5 Ruth possessed something that kept her from giving up. From ‘throwing in the towel.’ From taking the easy, wide, even safer path of staying in Moab, with Moab’s gods, but instead she opted for the harder, narrower, and riskier path in Israel, with Israel’s God, and she became a part of something bigger and better that she could have ever hoped f...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Joshua 2:1-21; Matthew 1:1-5 In the Bible, Rahab is always identified as a ‘prostitute’ except in one place. Wanna take a guess as to where? Matthew’s genealogy! When she is spoken about in the same breath as Jesus… the One so named because “he will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21)... she is no longer characterized by her past identity of sin; she is a mother, a...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Genesis 38:1-30; Matthew 1:1-3 Before he gets into the actual story of Jesus, before he even gets to Christmas, Matthew begins His gospel a list of names of the ancestors of Jesus' family tree. Not totally unusual for someone of Jesus’ caliber. But there is an interesting detail, an usual deviation in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. When listing Jesus’ ancestors, Matthew goes...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Psalm 115:1-3; Daniel 7; Acts 1:4-11 Our earliest Christian ancestors did not see the Ascension as an anticlimactic, lackluster finale to the gospel or an awkward, clumsy send-off of Jesus after Easter; rather, they saw the Ascension as the continuation of what God was doing through the sending of Jesus in the first place! They saw the Ascension as the inauguration and coron...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Luke 17:11-19 As I was reflecting on this story this week, I couldn’t help but wonder if the majority of people, 9 out of 10 people, who have somehow been blessed by God, take for granted what God has just done for them? Not because they are somehow nefarious sinners. Not because they don’t obey God and want to make Him proud. But because they miss out on the other blessings...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Esther 4:1-17 Did you know that the book of Esther holds the distinction of being the only book of the Bible to not mention God once ? This has caused many throughout the centuries, Jewish and Christian, to ask why should we care about this story if God seemingly isn’t in it? As God-fearing, men and women of faith, what are we to do with this story? But what if the lack of e...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Luke 19:1-10 I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you all are familiar with this story... We've all sung the song haven't we? 'Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he.' But I think there's more to it than that? That this 'wee little' story in the Gospel of Luke is more than meets the eye...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 In my experience… for a lot of good and faithful Christians that I know… they’ve been conditioned to read the Bible believing there's something scary at the end of the book… And because of that… any texts or passages about how the Bible all ends… wind up being texts that always frighten us! And either they don't read them… Completely forfeitin...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Proverbs 17:27-28, 18:2, 6-7, 13, 17; James 1:19 We live in a time when being heard is almost an anomaly... despite how much of our time is spent talking to one another… Yet despite the surplus of talking, listening, it seems, is almost a lost art. It feels like folks are clamoring - more than ever - to simply be heard yet are getting no ‘signal’ from the folks around them....

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18 Jesus told His disciples: “You are the light of the world—like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden... So let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father” (Matt 5:14, 16). However if you keep listening to Jesus’ mountain side sermon… Jesus will eventually also say: ‘Be careful! Watch out! Take heed! Do...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Matthew 21:18-22 This is the only example of a negative miracle in all the canonical Gospels. All the other miracles Jesus performs are about blessing and bringing about life. So it makes the cursing of the fig tree standout among the rest. It feels like Jesus is doing something, that for many of us, we’d say it a bit out of character. But for our Christian ancestors, our Ch...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Jonah 4:1-11; Matthew 20: 1-16, Luke 15:25-32 Wanna know the real reason behind why Jonah skipped town and fled to Tarshish? It wasn't because he was scared of the Ninevites… It’s because he knew what would happen if he went. He knew exactly, beat-for-beat, play-for-play, what would happen if he introduced his God to those people… And if these people repented, he knew ho...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Jonah 3:1-10; Romans 5:6-11; Col 1:19-22 You wanna know something crazy? The God that “changed his mind” about the Ninevites… The God who cared about that no good ‘great’ city of scum and villains. That demonstrated to them slowness of anger and an abundance of mercy. That God hasn’t changed! In fact, roughly five hundred years later that same God would arrive in this world,...

Pastor Taylor Shippy - Jonah 1:4-2:10; Mark 8:34-36; James 1:2-4 For the longest time, I thought nothing substantial happened inside the belly of the fish. I had heard the Jonah story enough times, and I figured it was simply a means to get Jonah back on the right path towards Nineveh. An elaborate U-turn, if you will? A cul-de-sac in the plot for God to put Jonah on the straight and narrow. And u...