A View From The Earth

A stained glass of St. Paul. He had to keep reminding the Church in Corinth to stay on the correct path. This is the sermon I gave the Episcopal Church of the Saviour in Clermont, Iowa on February 13, 2011. 1 Corinthians 3:1-9 Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer. The Corinthians self-image was of a spiritually mature congregation, endowed with all the spiritual gifts they needed, well taught and self-sufficient. In fact they were quite similar to some churches today. They thought their learning and their experience of the gifts of God made them better than others. But as Paul looks at them he says Mature? I think not! Spiritual? No! Not spiritual. You could say they’re suffering from what you might call an adolescence syndrome. They think they’re mature, and in some respects they are, but in other respects they’re still acting like children. What they don’t realize is that mere lapse of time doesn’t bring...

Martin Luther King Jr. This is the sermon I gave the Episcopal Church of the Saviour in Clermont, Iowa on January 16, 2011. John 1:29-1:41 Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer. In 1961, one of the abiding symbols of the Cold War and Communism went up between East and West Germany. On November 9, 1989, that symbol came down. I remember watching TV news reports as people celebrated on top of the wall and how they took sledgehammers to break the wall down by themselves. I also remember reading an article about the fall of the Berlin Wall written by a World Methodist Council representative, it quoted a sign that the author saw the day after the wall came down, it read, 'Not the bear, not the lion, not the tiger, but the Lamb; the Lamb wins! The lamb is usually a sign of gentleness and timidity, prone to disaster from many hazards. But for Christians, the lamb is a sign of victory. In today’s lesson, John...