Note: This sermon was originally delivered on the Second Sunday in Christmas on January 2, 2022 and references the following texts: Jeremiah 31:7-14, Matthew 2:1-12 Merry Christmas! I know, I know, the world outside the church has moved on… but we still have several more days of Merriment ahead of us, and I for one am happy to have all the Christmas I can get right now. So I say again: Merry Christmas! This week I was watching a video where four friends were making arguments to one another for why a given Christmas movie was, obviously, the best Christmas movie of all time. I’ll confess here that I am not a fan of Christmas movies in general. But I was interested to hear how these four friends, who run a YouTube channel that discusses history and literary or media analysis, would discuss the genre. True to form, they developed a scoring system by which the three “judges” would assess if the film the presenter was discussing was a “good” Christmas movie. They judged o...
This sermon was first delivered on July 3rd, 2022. The text being interpreted is Isaiah 66:10-14 I once had an American History book from the late 1850s. I’m not sure where it is now… I moved a lot in the last ten years and somewhere along the way I’ve misplaced it… but for a student of history, it was a fascinating book… When a nation is less than 100 years old, any comprehensive history is going to be a lot more granular than when it is 250 years old, all due respect to our British friends with thousands of years to chronicle. I learned about highly influential people in the early history of this nation who I had never learned about, even in “advanced” US history classes. But probably the most fascinating part of this text was the closing chapter, where the authors wrote about the present state of the nation, on the cusp of the Civil War. I’ll never forget the first time I read it. These are people who knew well from studying the trajectories of past nations what th...