In this sermon reflect on Jesus who on the Sabbath healed a woman who had been hunched over for eighteen years. We consider why the synagogue official had a problem with this, why he shouldn’t have had a problem with this, and what it all has to do with Sabbath, which is about way more than taking a day off to crash at the end of otherwise frenzied week, but that which touches every moment of our lives. We consider how our rituals become pointless when they are disconnected from the deeper meaning. We are, then, invited into the deeper meaning of Sabbath, which is an endless joy and delight in God and all that God has made.

In this sermon, we talk about the story of fear versus the story of love. Talking our cues from Jesus, we consider what it means not to be afraid. We look at how people prep for the future out of fear, as well as how the story of fear plays out in our culture in so many ways. We consider, instead, our call to prep or to be ready for the arrival of the Son of Man. We consider the practices of hospitality, peacemaking, and generosity as what it means to be ready, versus the practices of suspicions, preemption, and accumulation. A story about how a man named Julio Diaz treated a would-be thief inspires us into the ways of the kingdom.

In this sermon we consider our relationship with our stuff. We take our cues from Jesus’ story of the rich man who was never satisfied with what he had, whose wealth and security was defined by things. We consider “The Cultural Mandate” to farm and take care of the creation. With the help of Ecclesiastes, we look at what it really means to eat, drink, and rejoice and how when we are rich toward God, when our treasure is in heaven, we can overcome anxiety and worry with joy because our ultimate satisfaction lies in the God who is in-but-beyond all things.

This sermon is about prayer. We consider who it was that taught us to pray in our lives. We consider breathing as an image of what Paul means when he say to pray without ceasing. When Jesus teaches them to pray, the heart of his teaching is not about mechanics, but about them realizing the God to whom they are prayer, that this God is good and wants to give them everything they’re asking and seeing and knocking for because what they ask, seek, and knock for is God and God never withholds himself.

In this sermon, we explore the connection between action and contemplation in the Christian life. We see the story of the Good Samaritan and the Mary at the feet of Jesus as related. We consider that how Christ is always putting himself in a position to be received and how distracted we can often be from his presence, which leads to a reminder about the reality of acedia in our culture. Thomas Merton, Frederich Buechner, and Parker Palmer are quoted along the way. We end with the invitation to sit at the feat of Jesus and to listen.

Summary: In this sermon we do a walk through the Good Samaritan story as the early church would have read it, which is as a story of the creation, fall, and redemption of all things. We use “The Good Samaritan Window” at the Chartres Cathedral in France in order to enter deeper into the story through the eyes of the early church.

We begin by looking at a book called *Journeys of Simplicity* in order to help us think about how we carry our selves in the world. We turn to Jesus’ emphasis on peace as he sends of the seventy-two. We argue that peace is how we are to carry ourselves in the world as follows of Jesus. We close with Paul’s teaching to the Galatians that we are to be gentle, bear one another burdens, and always do good to all no matter the circumstances. We consider the witness of the response of the West Nickel Mines Amish community to the 2006 school shooting as an example of how to carry yourself in the world for sake of the peace that Christ makes possible.

In this sermon we look at a major turning point in Jesus’s ministry, when he begins to set his face towards Jerusalem. We touch on what it means to be on “the way” with Jesus. We considered what it means to put Jesus center-stage, of what it means to be disciples, which is to have a whole-hearted devotion to Jesus, or to be entirely sanctified as Paul says.