Explore past sermons from Peace Lutheran Church. Read a summary, find the scripture references, and download the original sermon manuscript.
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The Cost of Discipleship
Mark embeds this story of John the Baptist’s beheading between the bookends of the disciples’ first successful mission. Why? Perhaps to caution his audience that we need to be realistic about the cost of discipleship and the depth of resistance that inevitably confronts those who attempt to change the status quo.
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The Way of Vulnerability
Today’s gospel is a two-act play. In the first act, Jesus returns for the third time to his hometown and experiences first hand the rejection of those who once knew him. The experience, Mark tells us, leads Jesus to send his apprentices out on a missionary journey of their own; a journey which they seem…
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The Great Healer
The entire fifth chapter of Mark is a series of healing stories and today two of them are before us: stories of a woman and a girl; one with a chronic illness, the other who lies at death’s door. I cannot read today’s gospel without remembering a woman named Jeanerette, a member of the Karuk…
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Earthen Vessels
We carry the treasure of what God has done and is doing in Jesus in the clay jars of our lives, within the crucible of our stories and relationships. Cracked, chipped, and flawed though they may be, our lives hold the treasure which God intends to bring to all creation. Paul knew from his life…
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Finding Abba
Family histories can turn out to be pretty messy things. People don’t always make wise decisions. Fathers—and for that matter, Mothers, too—don’t always behave honorably. Promises get broken. People get hurt. Fates get entangled as we fall into each other’s lives and fall out again. And in trying to unravel all the why’s and how’s…
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Tuning in to Creation’s Groaning
We human beings are really good at making life all about us—but, says Paul, it’s not all about us; the human species. The whole creation has a place in God’s plan; the whole creation is on this journey away from bondage and decay and toward wholeness and freedom and restoration. The WHOLE creation groans with…
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Walking the Slackline
It’s called SLACKLINING, and it traces its origins to the 1980’s in Yosemite National Park when rock climbers began rigging a piece of tubular webbing between two trees for a more dynamic balancing experience. Over the past 30 years slacklining has become an extreme sport with highly skilled slackliners doing daredevil stunts on lines stretched…
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The Disrupting Power of the Holy Spirit
During these Sundays of Easter the first readings follow the ARC of Christ’s mission vision in the book of ACTS. YOU WILL BE MY WITNESSES, Jesus had told his disciples, IN JERUSALEM, IN JUDEA, SAMARIA, AND TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH. Today’s pivotal story tells how the Holy Spirit disrupts status quo, opening up…
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Of Vine, Branches, and Quilts
On this QUILT BLESSING Sunday, guest preacher Boots Winterstein pieces together Christ’s teaching: I AM THE VINE, YOU ARE THE BRANCHES. THOSE WHO ABIDE IN ME, AND I IN THEM, BEAR GREAT FRUIT, with the ministries of our congregation, and with the story of an Eritrean woman who, thanks to the gift of a LWR…
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Seeing the Resurrected Christ Anew
Through the centuries interpretations of this post-resurrection story have been nearly as focused on THOMAS as they have been on the RISEN JESUS. Thomas’s refusal to believe that Jesus has been raised from the dead without first seeing the evidence with his own eyes has endeared him to all skeptics. His reluctance is also a…