Sermons on Faith (Page 19)

Habits of the Heart

Happy Birthday! Today is Pentecost, the birthday of the church. This is the point when God’s mission of creation and redemption began to be manifest in the church. Of course it wasn’t an organization or an institution at that point, it was just a group, but an identifiable group, of Jesus’ disciples. They were all together in one place when the Spirit came upon them. And soon they weren’t locked in a room anymore – they were out in the…

Wholeness (Slow Church 3)

This morning I’m continuing with the sermon series based on the book Slow Church. The title Slow Church is a riff on the Slow Food movement which, unlike fast food, provides locally and sustainably sourced food. Today when we talk about whole food we think of the grocery chain, but before that, whole foods referred to food which was un-processed and often organically and locally produced. Today we’ll be thinking about wholeness in the life of the faith community. Wholeness…

Narrative Theology #1

I have two concrete early memories of church from my childhood, one fairly happy, and one much less so.  The happy memory is of attending services at my grandmother’s small Presbyterian church in LaSalle, Michigan. To a child, church isn’t necessarily the most interesting way to spend an hour on a Sunday morning, but I was a reasonably compliant and well-behaved kid, and I liked to please my grandmother.  So, we went.  I can still remember the smell of that…

Wobbling but not Falling

Almost every week I talk with my dear friend Rebecca in Scotland. Sometimes when I ask how she’s doing she says “I had a major wobble this week.” A major wobble. A major wobble is when things seem to get out of control and temporarily beyond our emotional capacity to handle. In some ways, I think we at St Ben’s have been having a major wobble. Two of our beloved members have died in the last few months – Elizabeth…

Why was it necessary?

1 Peter 1:17-23 Luke 24:13-35 This morning’s gospel is a deeply heart-warming story of the two disciples who walked in deep sorrow and in their sadness did not recognize the resurrected Christ walking by their side. Those of us who have experienced grief or illness know how that happens; in our times of deepest pain it is most difficult to recognize God, which is one of the reasons that developing a discipline of looking for God in the midst of…

Terroir – the flavor of St. Ben’s

This year is our 30th anniversary, and we are considering it to be a year of celebration and discernment. For more than seventeen years we have been working to build a church which can provide a physical home for the worship and service of God and our community. Now that is pretty much complete, and we have a plan for how we will continue to develop our facilities as we have the time, money and inclination. So what next? It…

Our Calling

Fishing on the Sea of Galilee was not a great job. It was dangerous, with the sudden storms that swept upon the lake. And it didn’t bring in much money. Fishing was big business, but unlike the captains here in Morro Bay, the fishermen were not entrepreneurs. They were at the bottom of a rigid hierarchy, and got to keep very little of what they caught. Fishermen had to have licenses to fish the waters as well as provide most…

The Music of the Heart

The New Year is here.   We’re facing a year of great struggles, in our nation and in the world, in our communities and even within our own families.  Most of us are already weary, and it’s only Day One.  Can we trust that God is speaking to us in the midst of this chaos, inviting us to be co-creators of a better future?   And how can we hear God speaking in the midst of the chaos, so we can…