Living Faith: Heights Sermons

What does it mean that God has put eternity into the human mind? What this means is that God has placed the desire for wholeness in the human heart. A theological reflection on Ecclesiastes 3:1-11.

All you have to do is hear and believe, and all the treasures of heaven will be open to you! A message about the good news of God’s grace.

The image of the potter's wheel is a classic of biblical storytelling. It appears again and again in the history of salvation. In one such story, the prophet Jeremiah went down to a potter’s house. There, he witnessed a master craftsman working at his wheel. But the vessel he was making was spoiled in his hands. But the potter, like any master craftsman, promises to remake what was spoiled. This is God's promise to us: even when we are broken or tainted, God promises to work with us and refashion us until we are remade in God's perfect image.

Where is home? The Apostle Paul would argue that our homeland is in heaven. In a manner of speaking, we live here, on earth, as resident aliens. When we were baptized, we were made citizens of the kingdom of heaven. A kingdom that is everywhere and nowhere. It is everywhere because its people are dispersed throughout all the kingdoms of this world. It is nowhere because its values are not consistent with the values of the culture that surrounds it.

What does it mean that we can call God our Father? What it means is that we have access to God. This is a big deal because, by nature, we have no access to God. What Paul is saying in this passage is that the Holy Spirit leads us to Christ, and Christ carries us to God our Father. Since Christ is the Son of God by nature—the one who has direct access to his God and Father—we are made siblings of Christ by adoption.

A lot of people confuse morality with religion. The two are not synonymous. You can follow all the rules; you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and acquire status among your peers, but that doesn’t get you any closer to God. If you want to get closer to God, you have to let go. You have to relinquish your grip. And that takes a leap of faith.

It is easy to forget just how great Jesus’ anguish was in the last days of his life. The tendency for the church has always been to step too quickly from the cross to the resurrection, from Jesus’ humanity to his divinity. But if we make this leap too quickly, we fall victim to neglecting his humanity. And if we neglect Jesus’ humanity, we neglect our own salvation. On this Resurrection Sunday, I invite you to sit and dwell with the fullness of Jesus’ humanity.

What is God like? Religious people have been asking this question for millennia. As Presbyterians, we believe that unless God first speaks to us, we cannot know who God is. Our experiences of life, of humanity, of the world, are so out of sync with God that unless God reveals Godself to us, we are utterly blind to who God is. The Good News is that God has spoken. The first and last word out of God’s mouth is Jesus. Jesus is the very image of God. So if you want to know God, all you have to do is look at Jesus. He is God’s Word in picture form. And the picture he draws is one of compassion. God is compassion. Mercy is at the very root of who God is.

What is meant by the Eternity of God? Eternity, though it be not easy to understand, is highly practical. It is what the Emmaus Road Story is all about. Jesus meets his disciples on the way and fills their present with his presence. Eternity is the maximal presence of all time in the moment of Now. God makes all of Jesus' earthly life present on the road to Emmaus. Through a simple act of breaking bread, Jesus makes himself present to his disciples as a living reality.

What does it mean that "faith comes by hearing?” Does that exclude seeing? No. Rather, it teaches that the spoken word is God’s primary mode of communication. Hearing is the primary source of faith, but God adds visual aids to bolster what we have heard. Thus, faith comes by hearing, but hearing is aided by seeing. In the Reformed tradition, we call these sacraments. Sacraments are like visual aids appended to the spoken word to nurture our faith.

Today is Easter, or to use its older name, Resurrection Sunday. On this day, Christ rose from the dead and left behind an empty tomb for his followers. Every year, during the Jewish Passover, we celebrate the hope of the resurrection—a hope that carries us from despair to freedom.

Today is Palm Sunday. Jerusalem is where all the action takes place. Jerusalem is the City of Heaven. Long considered the dwelling place of God, to get there, you have to ascend a mountain because it is built at elevation. Herein we discover a certain irony about Jerusalem. The City on a Hill ought to be the closest thing to heaven on earth, yet, in practice, it is the farthest thing from it. The Roman colonizers have transformed the City of Heaven into a dungeon of desecration.

Can Judas be redeemed? His life was tragic, but who among us has not done things we regret? Judas betrayed Jesus. However, if we take the mercy and providence of God seriously, then Judas can be saved. Karl Barth's analysis of the New Testament provides grounds for rethinking the old Reformed doctrine of limited atonement in light of God's infinite mercy and providential care. Grounds that make it possible for even Judas to be redeemed.

If someone asks you, ‘What is the Gospel?’ You can tell them the parable of the prodigal son. Because everything that Jesus is and does is conveyed in this short parable. Jesus is the prodigal son. He makes possible even the possibility of reconciliation between God and humanity because, as the prodigal, he squandered his father’s possessions in the far country before returning home. And we who are sinners are carried with and by Jesus on his way home. Because of him, we are reconciled to our God and Father.

As we enter the Third Sunday in Lent, the theme is repentance. We all have things we regret. Things we wish we could do over. The moral of the Gospel reading this morning is that God gives us second chances. John the Baptist came into the wilderness and said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” As we turn our faces toward Jerusalem this Lent, let us hear anew the urgency of the call to repentance.

If the theme last week was temptation, then today, it is grief. Abram was no stranger to grief. In a vision from God, he laments that God had given him no child. But Abram’s story is the story of God’s promise. God makes a promise to Abram that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky. And God is forever faithful to the promise.

Today is the First Sunday of Lent. Lent is a journey through the wilderness. It is a time of testing and hardship. But it is the will of the Spirit that drives us into the wilderness. The Holy Spirit is a destabilizing force in our lives. The Spirit is always on the move. Stirring the waters of our lives. Pushing us to get off the couch and do something. Because unless we are moving, we will never get to where God wants us to be.

When tragedy strikes, we often blame God. Our blame doesn't stem from God's absence so much as from our perplexity regarding the situation. The disciples were no different. When faced with the transfiguration of Jesus, they were unsure exactly what to make of it, and their confusion led them to make some false assumptions about God.

“Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you.” These are some of the sharpest imperatives of what might be called Jesus’ ethic of nonviolence. Nonviolence does something superior that retributive violence could never achieve. It disrupts the endless cycle of violence by depriving your enemy of hostility.

It often takes an attitude adjustment to see things the way God sees them. Seeing Rightly is what Jesus' Sermon on the Mount is all about. When we see rightly, we gain a right standing in God’s eyes.

Luke’s Gospel tells us that after Simon came face to face with Jesus, he left everything and followed him. This is not just a call story. It is a parable about the forgiveness of sins. Before Simon drops everything to follow Jesus, he declares, “I am a sinful man!” Following Jesus requires repentance.

A nonperson is someone regarded as nonexistent. Having no social or legal status, they lack the civil protections of the state as well as the cultural privileges afforded to ethnic tribes. They are persons without an identity. God seeks out these nonpersons and gives them an identity in Jesus Christ. That is the message of the Gospel. It was this message that Jesus preached in his hometown Synagogue at Nazareth.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is January 27. It was on that day in 1945 that Auschwitz was liberated. The book of Esther tells us to remember these days. Never forget. Memory is the first line of defense against tyranny.

Some people like to jump ahead to the end of a book without reading all the way through. They want the good news of the conclusion without all the drama in the middle. Of course, life doesn’t work that way. There is a meantime. Every story needs its plot. Try as we might to skip ahead to Easter Sunday, we must all pass through Good Friday.

We are living in an age where community is breaking down. The social bonds we once shared are beginning to fray. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians speaks precisely to this problem. The advice Paul gives is rooted in God’s gift to us, the gift of community.

Who is Jesus Christ? John speaks of the Christ as the Word of God (the Logos). Before there was Creation, there was Christ. He was in the beginning. And he was with God. And he was God. All things came into being through him. In this sermon, I touch on the varied philosophical meanings of the term Logos and what they can teach us about the person of Christ.

Spiritual growth isn’t something we talk about as much as we ought to, so it’s important to understand what it is and why it’s important. Jesus lays out the paradigm for our spiritual growth. Every experience he went through in life was an opportunity for growth. Likewise, we grow in wisdom as we journey through life. Spiritual growth is the name we give to the journey of reliance on God’s grace that a community undergoes in unison.

The glory of God shines through the ordinariness of our everyday lives.

John the Baptist comes on the scene, warning people that the ax lies at the root of the tree. Many of us would prefer to skip over John’s apocalyptic message. However, there can be no Bethlehem manger without first traveling through John’s wilderness. John prepares the way for the coming of the Christ child.

To accept John the Baptist's message of repentance is to prepare your heart to receive the gift of the Spirit.

When it feels like the end is drawing near, that’s when we’re primed for redemption. We crave something new when it seems everything old is on the verge of passing away. Hope becomes tangible only when it seems all hope is lost.

There is a truism that applies to any trade: a student trusts his or her teacher. Everything the student does reflects back on the teacher. Christ is our Teacher. Whatever we do, in word or in deed, should honor Christ. Because whoever trusts in him honors the One who sent him.

In the story of the widow's offering, Jesus contrasts corrupt authorities with the people they exploit for financial gain. In the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, Jesus calls out the religious establishment for their faithlessness and urges the church not to valorize poverty as a spiritual ideal.

In life and in death, nothing can separate us from the love of God. A sermon in honor of Dia de los Muertos.

Faith is the beginning of a lifelong journey of following Jesus on the way, trusting in him to restore our lives.