February 23, 2025 Acts 3:1 – 10 Today is the fourth Sunday of this sermon series I’m calling “Finding Our Balance.” I had the idea for this series because as I’m sure you’ve noticed, we’re living in what we might call weird times. The political and social landscape is changing so fast and so...
February 16, 2025 Ruth 1:12 – 18 Before I started my work as Pastor here at U Park, I was serving at St. Andrew United Methodist Church, 8 or 10 miles south of here on University Boulevard. My first day at St. Andrew was a Saturday rather than a Sunday, because they were working on...
February 9, 2025 Matthew 27: 11 – 14 About 25 years ago, I was on a Saturday hike in the mountains with a couple of friends. It was a gorgeous fall day; the air was crisp and the Aspens were gold and the sky was that electric blue that’s always most intense in...
Well, I’m pleased to announce this morning that after a long, hard-fought Presidential campaign we finally had an election on Tuesday. Fortunately, it went off pretty smoothly, without the violence and chaos that some of us had been concerned about, so that’s good.
I imagine some of you are familiar with the work of Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, a teacher and an author who passed away in 2022 at the age of 95. Nhat Hanh first came to prominence when he was exiled from Vietnam for his protest against the Vietnam war, his refusal to take a side, his consistent advocacy for peace. In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel peace prize. In his nomination letter, King wrote that he knew of no one more worthy of the award than “this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam.”
About 10 years ago, when I was working at Denver Urban Ministries, a colleague of mine came to me to talk about the possibility of a new church in the Denver Area. If I remember right, she was preparing to approach what was called the New Church Development Committee with a proposal, and she was sort of running the idea by several Pastors she knew to get our thoughts. Her idea was pretty simple, and I liked it. She wanted to build a church around service.
There’s a funny thing about end of the world predictions: they never seem to be wrong. Of course they’re never right either, so the people making those predictions often have to reinterpret them, or explain them differently, or revise. But preachers and self-appointed scholars trying to strike holy terror into our hearts by announcing the end times rarely if ever just shrug and admit they were mistaken.
I’m writing the day after the election, and so like many of us I’ve been thinking about the state of our country.
As I hope you’ve noticed, I make it a policy not to embrace any kind of political partisanship in preaching or worship. The church is not my personal political platform, nor should it be. At the same time, as Gandhi once wrote, the person who believes that religion and politics have nothing to do with one another does not understand religion or politics. I fervently hope that our votes and political involvement will be rooted in our faith. But while I always want people to take their faith into the voting booth, I don’t tell anyone how to vote.
I know it’s not the way things usually go, but when I was a young man, say in my 20s, I was a lot more cynical than I am now. When I started out as a Pastor, I’d already worked in churches for six years. And I’m sad to say it, but in those six years I’d seen plenty of bad behavior in the church. I had no illusions about the moral purity of Pastors, or the political maneuvering and turf wars that go on in the institutional church. I kind of prided myself on being suspicious of power in any form, knowing that the institutional church is vulnerable to being manipulated by abusive, power hungry people like any institution.
This week, I learned that the oldest structure on earth built by human beings, or at least the oldest one that’s been discovered so far, is a fish trap. There’s debate about just how old it actually is, but a lot of the people who study this stuff agree that sometime between 30 thousand and 40 thousand years ago, a group of people living in what we know as the Australian state of New South Wales gathered rocks of various sizes and built a whole bunch of channels and circular pools in the Barwon river. So fish would swim down the river and enter one of these channels They would swim along between the rock walls until they got to a circular pool.
