Sermons Archive

First Sunday in Lent  March 9, 2025  Luke 4:1 – 13    I don’t remember when I first learned about...

March 2, 2025  Luke 9:28 – 36    When I was in high school, I never did any babysitting. I...

February 23, 2025  Acts 3:1 – 10     Today is the fourth Sunday of this sermon series I’m calling “Finding...

February 16, 2025  Ruth 1:12 – 18   Before I started my work as Pastor here at U Park, I was...

February 9, 2025    Matthew 27: 11 – 14     About 25 years ago, I was on a Saturday hike...

If you’ve read much American history, you might have heard about what’s called the Brooks-Sumner incident of 1856. On May 22nd of that year, about five years before the civil war started, U.S. Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a pro-slavery Democrat, walked into the Senate Chamber with two of his friends, fellow South Carolina Congressman Laurence Keitt and Virginia Representative Henry Edmundson.

So tomorrow is the last day of the 12 days of Christmas. After months of preparation, months of consumerist frenzy, months of economists holding their breath to see what Christmas retail numbers would tell us, after weeks of Advent, the celebration of Christmas Eve and Day, family gatherings, gift exchanges, cards, travel, trees, decorations up, decorations down, after all of that, Christmas is at an end. I don’t know about you, but I could use a nap.

Does anyone remember the controversy around the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. that was dedicated in Washington D.C. in August of 2011? Actually, I guess there were two controversies. One was that one of the inscription on the monument was supposed to be a quotation from King, but when they unveiled the statue, the quote was actually something King didn’t say

I grew up in a small Methodist church, and I guess my basic Biblical knowledge was about average for a churchgoing kid raised in the 1970s and early 80s. I knew most of the greatest hits, the Bible stories every kid learns in Sunday School: the two creation stories in Genesis, the story of Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Moses and the Exodus, the birth of Jesus, stuff like that.

Do you ever think about how we depend on other people, usually without realizing it or even knowing them? I arrived at church today because for the most part, everybody on the road this morning as I drove over here was obeying traffic laws. (There was that one guy who ran through the stoplight after it changed, but I guess we’ve all kind of come to expect that. I am a little hazy about why he would need to do that before 7:00 on a Sunday morning, but hey, who am I to judge?)

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.”