This coming Sunday is our next once per quarter Current Events sermon. On the Monday before each Current Events sermon, I scour the headlines looking for sermon ideas. There are so many possibilities. Over the last 18 months, quite frankly, our national headlines haven’t changed a whole lot. That caused me to think about local headlines. I really hoped to find a hot topic that was making a splash right here in Lancaster County.

Initially I thought of Eagle Disposal and their struggle with labor shortage. I am an Eagle customer, and in the last few months, they have missed a regular weekly garbage and recycling collection three different weeks. All up and down our street, people would set out our collection bins, and they would remain on the edge of our yards for days, till one by one we realized that Eagle wasn’t picking up that week. Why would they not at least communicate with us? This past week Eagle sent a letter saying they were discontinuing recycling collection. Things are not well at Eagle. Why can’t they hire people? What might the Scriptures have to say about labor shortage or garbage collection? A lot, actually, and I would be glad to talk with you about that. But in the end, I decided not to talk about Eagle.

Instead, I asked three local Christians what they thought I should preach about. They each attend other churches, and they each have a unique vantage point in our community. Matt Hess is an East Lampeter Township Detective. Sally Bredeman is principal of Smoketown Elementary. Anne Shannon is a WGAL reporter. All live in Conestoga Valley, and all have kids who attend the school district. Additionally, their jobs put them in communication with a wide cross-section of the community. Finally, I asked my barber, Shane, who works at Main Street Barber Shop in Leola. He might have the most interesting conversations of all. They responded with a variety of ideas that I could preach about, many of which you would find quite familiar: personal responsibility, sexual identity/ethics, Covid, etc. I thought their responses could lead to an interesting panel discussion or sermon series.

But as I reflected on their suggestions, I had the sense that we need to see the forest for the trees. They gave me excellent ideas, each of which we could say was an individual tree, a singular issue in society. It struck me that we all likely already have opinions about those issues. It would be helpful to examine what Scripture would have to say about those issues, and sometime perhaps we will, but I thought it would be good to zoom out, trying to see the forest for the trees. What I mean is this: what are the societal or cultural forces that influence how we have already formed our opinions about those issues? We first need to examine those forces, those influences, before we evaluate the issues. And that led me to our sermon topic for this coming Sunday’s Current Events sermon. See if you can figure it out…it’s a bit of riddle. Here it is:

Why We Are A Purple Church

Have any ideas what it is about? Grab a Bible and play the sermon to see what Scripture has to say about why we are a purple church.