Sermon Podcast: Bringing Forth Justice

And don’t you think the church—among the inheritors of this promise to Isaiah—is always in danger of missing this point, convinced as it often is that the reign of God will be established only when the church gets everything right?

It’s easy to forget that the church isn’t an end in itself; it’s a tool, chosen by God to bring about God’s purposes. We find it easy to believe that God’s work will be accomplished by the force of the church’s charismatic personalities or through the power of its innovative programming—when in reality, God’s work very often gets done in spite of what the church considers its strength, rather than because of it.

Why?

Because, according to Isaiah, the glory of God shines in bruised reeds and dimly burning wicks. If you want to do the work of God, recognizing your brokenness is a good place to start.

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Sermon Podcast: God with Us

With everything going quickly to seed, we needed a sign of God’s salvation. We needed a God who wasn’t afraid to jump in and get dirty hands. We needed a God who wasn’t ashamed to walk the roads we walk. We needed a God who wasn’t afraid to be with us.

And that’s something I think we still look for. With the sands continually shifting beneath our feet, with the uncertainty of facing life in our precarious world, we need a God who’s not afraid to be with us.

We need a God who embraces our humanity, and not only our humanity, but a God who embraces us in the midst of each of our weak and fallen humanities.

When we cry out in the dry night of our shattered existences, we need a God who hears.

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Sermon Podcast: What If It's All Just a Dream?

"And for my part, I like to think Isaiah’s singing a song about a new day, a new world where the hope of God’s people will be met by the power of God’s saving hand—where those who’ve been cast aside, abandoned, 'othered,' left to die alone with no one to speak terrible and beautiful words over their lifeless bodies will 'come to Zion singing'; and 'they shall not hurt on all my holy mountain.'

"In a gray place where hopelessness seems to rule the day, in a flattened and dry land where walls are built, and where even in church, we often can’t see our way to welcome one another—we wonder how our perseverance in the struggle to follow Jesus, to live together faithfully makes any difference.

"Standing on tiptoes we peer with the eyes of hope into the darkness, awaiting a word from God about the dream of our deliverance from the desert."

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