Roseville Covenant Sermons

From the RCC 2025 Christmas Eve candlelight Lessons & Carols

In today’s world, women are pushed up against two realities. The first is that they still often exist in the shadows of men. The other is that they are bombarded by messages of all kinds about how to live: messages about power and rights and bodies. Secular voices on these matters stand in stark contrast to how scripture invites women to be in the world. Yes, there are power scales to be balanced,...

Surveys tell us Americans are steadily losing trust in institutions like government, media, education, and (near the top of the list) "organized religion." This isn't new. The Bible tells more than a few stories of corruption in the temple & priesthood. This includes the days that Jesus was born into. First century Jews not only longed for political revolution to overthrow the Roman occupation...

The final book of the Old Testament was written around 400BC—words of the prophet Malachi. Following Malachi, we don’t have any prophetic Biblical writings for the next four centuries. Sometimes Christians will then describe John the Baptist as the prophet who breaks the 400 years of silence. But chronologically, the first person in the New Testament described as a prophet is actually Anna, a wido...

The story of Joseph may live only as a musical drama with a flashy coat in some of our minds, but in the biblical narrative, Joseph’s story takes up 13 of the 50 chapters of Genesis. And there is far more to this tale than mere teenage jealousy between brothers. The story of Joseph takes us deep into the heart of a decades long family conflict that illuminates the effects of sibling rivalry and th...

Consistency is one of the main things we look for in honorable people.  Will they do what they say they will do? Do their behaviors resemble their values? One of the repeating themes in the stories of Genesis is that our protagonists are sadly quite inconsistent. There is a tragic irony that on one page of the Bible a character can be noble and courageous, and then on the very next page they make...

There is a cliche that is often true: silence speaks volumes. In last week's scripture we read of a profound encounter Jacob has with God. Yet as we turn the page in Genesis, the Almighty seems absent from the story that follows and its effects are chilling. We read a dark tale from the next generation of Abraham's family: a daughter is assaulted, a father is silent (negligent), brothers become du...

Last week we met a character in Genesis with an unflattering name. The name Jacob means, "supplanter" and it rhymes with words like "heel-grabber" and "trickster". His name resembles his conduct. Jacob is a scoundrel who extorts and deceives (Genesis 25 & 27). Following this he spends 20 years living as an exile in a strange place, and becomes the victim of another's trickery! (Genesis 29-31)...

There are few things in life that can get as complicated and messy as family. Our relationships with parents, siblings, spouses, and children are some of the most important we'll ever have, but they are the ones most fraught with discord. The book of Genesis is full of these kinds of stories and this week we'll look at one of the most famous: the sons of Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob & Esau (Genesi...

Here in chapters 21-22 of Genesis we get to some of the most troubling passages in the book: two stories of children endangered by adults. In chapter 21 Abraham and Sarah send the firstborn (Ishmael) out to the desert to die. In chapter 22 it appears for a moment God asks Abraham to offer the second born (Isaac) as a sacrificial offering. In both situations, God intervenes to prevent the death of...

My mom was a teacher for over 30 years before she retired two years ago. Throughout my childhood I heard about the collective bargaining that went on between her teacher’s union and the schools as salaries, benefits, and school calendars were negotiated. As we continue on in our Genesis sermon series, we’re continuing to look at the Sodom and Gomorrah story through Abraham’s eyes (Genesis 18:16-33...

Sometimes words and names have the ability to generate an immediate connotation. For example, simply saying “Sodom and Gomorrah” likely conjures up images of fire, sulfur, violence, sexual sin and maybe the odd ending of a human being turned into a pillar of salt. The mere mention of this city can be used as shorthand for wicked living or warnings to steer clear of serious punishment exacted by Go...

I've been living in Minnesota for fourteen years now. In some ways those 14 years feel like they've gone by fast, but in other ways my old life back in Chicago feels like a very long time ago. Had someone made a promise to me when I first moved to Minnesota that hasn't yet come to pass, I imagine I'd be getting impatient by now. That seems to be what's happening in our scripture reading this week....

Good storytellers know that good stories are rarely a predictable series of events where a protagonist only ever makes the right decision. Good stories always have trials and setbacks where characters must fail and learn from loss. This isn't just true of fiction. This is true of life in general; especially the spiritual life. Our journey from sin to salvation is always going to be a complicated o...

Even the most introverted of us probably know the pain of "not being invited" to a party. It's hard to get through life without feeling left out at some point. Exclusive groups are common to human nature as we tend to gather with people most like us. But just because something is biologically or sociologically "natural" does not make it entirely good. The gospel often prods us to move beyond our n...

A local church may often describe itself as a, "spiritual family". It's an appropriate biblical term. The Christians of the New Testament referred to themselves as brothers and sisters. In a world that suffers a lot of loneliness and isolation we might think the image of spiritual family is an inviting one, but many of us know that family life often comes with a lot of pain. Just like biological f...

The Christian life is one of becoming a disciple of Jesus. Sometimes we think becoming a Christian is relegated to a conversion moment or praying a certain prayer that eventually leads to becoming a disciple. But what if it is more about learning to follow Jesus in our everyday lives?  When Jesus calls the first disciples, he simply says “follow me”, and they do. We are not told if this is a conve...

Sometime in the late 6th century BC, a young Jewish priest and mystic had a vision: a valley full of skeletons (victims of a deadly conquest) lay before him and a voice asked him, "Can these bones live, o mortal?" The prophet replies, "only you know!" (Ezekiel 37:1-3). 500 years later the first Christians believed God had an answer to the question when he raised Jesus from the dead, and then procl...

In my house we often call laundry, "the never ending chore". With five people who are prone to get dirty, it seems never more than a day goes by before we need to start a new load or fold another pile. If the question is, "when is the laundry chore done?" The answer will be something like, "when we stop needing to wear clothes!"  Jesus once said, "be prepared to forgive seven times a day!" (Luke 1...

When I was a teenager, I used to do a lot of babysitting. It often felt like an exercise in administering nurture and care, reminding kids of what their parents said, and generally maintaining orderly conduct until mom and dad returned. In a not entirely parallel way, we hear Jesus in John’s gospel telling his disciples, that he is going away, but will not leave them as orphans, but that he will l...

About 65% of Americans describe their religion as “Christian” but less than half of those belong to a congregation or regularly attend worship services. This tells us maybe the hardest thing to believe about Christianity is not so much that Jesus was born of a virgin or that he  rose from the dead, but that God has instituted, “the holy catholic church, the communion of saints.”  Here in the 8th w...

Under the American system of criminal justice, a trial judge is not usually the one responsible to determine guilt or innocence (that's the jury's job), but a judge does hand down sentencing and punishments. There might be merits to this system within a democracy, but it has the potential to create confusion for readers of the Bible when we describe God as "Judge". In some ways, Biblical judgement...

This Sunday is the fourth week of our summer sermon series on the Apostles' Creed and we arrive at one of the more controversial phrases in the creed confessing that Jesus, "descended into Hades" (or sometimes it's rendered, "descended into hell"). These words provoke a lot of confusion and it's not unheard of for some churches to skip that line when they recite the creed! I can understand the tem...

Despite the fact that the Greeks and the Romans used crucifixion on thousands of criminals and insurgents, the Romans rarely wrote about crucifixion and crosses appear almost nowhere in Greco-Roman sculpture, painting, or mosaics. Why? The cross was one of the most sordid, disturbing, and taboo objects in antiquity. It was the most humiliating and degrading experience in the culture of the ancient...

Christian faith suggests there is a most important question upon which all life and history hangs, "who is Jesus Christ?" If he is indeed Lord of all, then knowing him might be the most important work we do in our lives. In a climactic moment in the final book of the Bible, the prophet John had a vision that continues to provoke us to know who Jesus is. A voice describes Jesus as, "the Lion of Jud...