Explore past sermons from Peace Lutheran Church. Read a summary, find the scripture references, and download the original sermon manuscript.
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Choices
It took the Hebrew children 40 years to graduate from the Wilderness School. Along life’s way things get complicated, and it’s not always as easy to make the right choice as it may first appear. Life is chockfull of choices. And we don’t always get them right. But the God revealed to us in Jesus…
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Invitation to Vulnerability
For a number of reasons, I’ve become keenly aware of the vulnerable state of things of late—within myself and my family; within our congregation and nation; around the globe. That awareness has been sharpened by deaths and near deaths that have touched my life and our community the last 12 months; a pattern that has…
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Here, By Me
When Jesus begins his public ministry by calling disciples from the ranks of fisherfolk, he shows us that he is no lone ranger. His work is about building community, about creating a fellowship, a new kind of family. In his first act of ministry he begins gathering that community of apprentices around him. He begins…
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Too Light a Thing
Some people are called to serve their own, their people, their tribe. And some people are called to serve, teach, and reach beyond their tribe. Jesus was one of those people. Martin Luther King was one those people. God told Martin: It’s not enough that you should minister to, with, and among the Black community….
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Walking Wet
This sermon was preached on the occasion to two siblings, ages 11 and 8, being baptized. Because GOD PROMISES, through the Holy Spirit, are embedded IN & WITH, UNDER & THROUGH the waters of baptism, whether the amount we use is three drops, a couple of pitchers full, or a whole ocean full, can be…
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Unlocking the Key of Nativity
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt in 1799 famously opened a door to understanding ancient Egyptian culture that had been closed for two thousand years. Over time, “ROSETTA STONE” has become a synonym for any interpretive key that enables previously unknowable mysteries to become known. Tonight, as we bend our ears to the…
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Of Dreams and Dreaming
Are dreams just a bit of undigested beef as Scrooge said, or is something deeper and more profound at stake? The Scriptures take dreams very seriously, and it’s often the case that a turning point in God’s unfolding salvation story hinges on a dream or vision. Today, in Matthew’s telling, it’s Joseph’s dream and his…
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God’s Dream
A global superpower strips the forest bare…yet despite this, hope emerges in the form of a “shoot from the stump of Jesse.” There’s no future in being a stump, yet, even a stump may play nurse to a shoot which springs from its roots; for after all God is in the hope business. THE ROOT…
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God the Thief
Matthew’s image of God as a thief prompts me to reflect on my family’s sabbatical experience aboard an Italian train between Naples and Sorrento. If God is a thief, what does God take from us? And might this a good thing?
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Two Poles and an Axel
There are two poles in our readings this morning—two wildly divergent visions of where the world is heading and what God is up to in the midst of it all. The first come from Isaiah, who speaks of the new thing God is about to do: “I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,…