Closing out the summer series on love, Pastor Margot Ann Perez-Greene turns to Paul's prayer for the church in Ephesus and asks whether "God loves you" has become so familiar it barely lands anymore. Drawing on voices from Thomas Long to C.S. Lewis to Rowan Williams, she traces the story of God's love not from "God loves everyone" outward, but backward, to a God who first fell in love with Abraham in particular, arguing that being loved specifically and by name means more than being loved generically. It's a sermon about a God who doesn't love from a distance, but pursues each person, however far off, all the way home.

Sermon date: September 6, 2026

Family Ministries intern Morgan Garrett builds this sermon around a childhood neighbor, a pastor named Paul who Morgan knew only as a warm, playful presence, never once talking theology, until learning after his death that he'd led a Gulf Coast diocese through the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. From there, Morgan turns to 1 John's claim that no one has seen God, and asks how God's love becomes visible anyway: through the body, through incarnation, and through a children's book about a village with no windows, where God turns out to live in the space between people. It's a gentle case for the old phrase "preach the gospel at all times, use words when necessary," landing, unexpectedly, by way of Dolly Parton.

Sermon date: August 30, 2026

Pastor LyAnna Johnson takes Psalm 139's meditation on being searched and known by God and pairs it with something almost nobody tells new parents outright: you cannot spoil a baby with love, and you cannot spoil a person with it either. Drawing on her own experience of unconditional family love, a Sesame Street book about a monster who turns out to be lovable, furry Grover, and a story about God opening a nail salon, she makes a simple, repeated point: nothing anyone has done, or hasn't done, changes how fully they're known and fully they're loved. It closes on one of the gentlest lines in the series so far: when God looks at you, God says beautiful and means it.

Sermon date: August 23, 2026

For the Blessing of the Backpacks, Pastor LyAnna Johnson swaps her usual sermon for an extended, fully conversational kids' time built around the two greatest commandments. She walks through the Greek word agape, a love that costs something, and stretches the idea of "neighbor" from the solar system down to the person in the next seat, landing on a simple definition: whoever we can reach out and touch, as long as they say it's okay. It's a warm, practical send-off into the new school year, full of small, doable ideas (learning names, sharing a pencil, saving a seat) for loving the people who are about to become new neighbors and classmates.

Sermon date: August 16, 2026

Pastor Margot Ann Perez-Greene closes out the summer lectionary with the ending of Matthew's Gospel, walking through three things that make it significant: the gathering of the disciples, the mountain setting, and the Great Commission itself. She lingers on one small but pivotal detail, that the disciples "worshiped and doubted" in the very same breath, to make the case that faith with doubt built in isn't a lesser kind of faith. Drawing on scholars from Mark Allen Powell to Tim Keller, she argues that the church has always been made up of worshiping doubters, and that Jesus sends us out anyway, promising not success, but his own presence.

Sermon date: August 9, 2026

Pastor LyAnna Johnson takes on the story of Jacob wrestling an unnamed figure until daybreak, refusing the tidy, well-lit religious art version in favor of the real one: two bodies in the dirt, all night, ending in a limp and a name change. She reframes Israel, literally "wrestles with God," as a kind of blessing on the struggle itself, arguing that some of the hardest, most honest encounters with God don't look peaceful at all. Drawing on her own therapy work and the idea of the "wounded healer," borrowed from Nadia Bolz-Weber's line about preaching from scars, not wounds, she makes the case that healing has to come before helping others, and that only the person who lived through something gets to decide whether it becomes beautiful.

Sermon date: August 2, 2026

Family Ministries Director Caasi Grove starts with a piece of acolyte symbolism that's easy to walk past every Sunday: carrying the flame in signals Christ's light entering the room, carrying it back out signals what the congregation is meant to do next. From there, she draws on a flood relief trip to Burney, Texas, where a group of students and adult leaders chose to stay and help even as a second storm rolled through, to make a direct case for what loving your neighbor actually costs. It's an unflinching call to bring light into hard, uncomfortable places rather than staying safely inside, and a reminder, borrowing from both Martin Luther King Jr. and John Wesley, that silence is its own kind of choice.

Sermon date: July 26, 2026

Pastor LyAnna Johnson takes on a parable that gets read as a story about sorting people into categories and pushes back on that reading directly: this isn't us versus them. Weaving in the one-year anniversary of last summer's hill country floods, a raccoon rescue that went viral, and some honest reflections on recent, painful headlines, she makes the case that no one is a finished project, that growth is often messy rather than pretty, and that the work of nurturing one another doesn't stop just because someone doesn't look, yet, like what they're becoming.

Sermon date: July 19, 2026

On the 50th anniversary of worshiping in WUMC's sanctuary, Pastor Margot Ann Perez-Greene takes the familiar Parable of the Sower and asks the congregation not to interpret it, but to let it interpret them. Framed by the movie Seven Days in Utopia and grounded in the story of the church's 82 charter members and their Cedar Cross potluck gatherings, she reframes the four soils not as categories of people but as parts of every person's own life: places that are hardened, rocky, thorny, or fertile, all at once. It's less a sermon with answers than an invitation to sit with the questions the parable is actually asking.

Sermon date: July 12, 2026

Pastor LyAnna Johnson unpacks the yoke, the same image behind the clergy stole she wears, on the anniversary weekend of last year's deadly hill country floods. She moves from Christ's incarnate presence in celebration, service, and grief alike into an unexpectedly tender teaching moment: how learning to float on her back as a kid became the way she learned to meditate, arms out, belly up, breathing. It's an invitation to stop carrying grief alone, and to trust that the only way out really is through.

Sermon date: July 5, 2026