June 30, 2013, The Rev. Doyt Conn preaching
This morning I’d like to focus on and then fuse the message from the Gospel with the wisdom from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. The hope is to gain a bit of insight into how we were made to live naturally in the kingdom of God. The key word to follow today is freedom.
June 23, 2013, The Rev Kate Wesch preaching
Elijah has really been through the ringer when today’s reading from I Kings begins.
To bring us up to date:
“He is headed into the wilderness because the evil Queen Jezebel had a contract out on his life and he was scared to death of her. He had good reason to be. He had just staged a contest on Mount Carmel between himself –one lonely prophet of Yahweh – and 450 of the prophets of Baal, whom Jezebel worshipped. The contest was to see whose god was really God, and Elijah won.
While Baal was nowhere to be found, Yahweh sent a blast of fire from heaven that no one present could deny, and Elijah marked the victory by killing every last one of the losers.
When Jezebel heard it she sent a message to Elijah, letting him know that he was about to be the next loser, and he knew her well enough to start running right then.
June 2, 2013, The Rev Doyt Conn preaching
Love is the framework of God. And while it is a framework that does not answer all of our questions or give us everything we want, it is the framework that can sustain our yearnings without crumbling; that can magnify our joys without indulgence; that can lift our hearts beyond the weight of idols. It is the framework that inspires us to love our family, to love our learning, to love our church.
May 19, 2013, The Rev. Doyt Conn preaching
The story we hear in the book of Acts today is one we hear every Pentecost. It is the story of the arrival of the Holy Spirit in a manner that changes all people, including Parthians, Medes and Elamites, as well as people from Mesopotamia, Pontus, and Pamphylia; but also Greeks and Palestinians, Russians and people from Georgia, Romania and Kazakhstan, and maybe, just maybe, people from a little parish in Seattle called Epiphany.
You may recall that 19 of us just returned from pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Our time there coincided with the Eastern Orthodox Holy Week. Jerusalem was packed with people from all over the world, on a journey to see the Holy Fire come out of the tomb from which Jesus rose victorious.
February 17, 2013, The Rev Kate Wesch preaching
Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday. About 100 of us gathered here in this place to meditate on how God sees us, what it means to enter a season of penitence and fasting, and to spend some moments embracing our mortality. The ashes smeared on our foreheads in the sign of the cross are such a visceral, earthy and outward sign of that mortality.
February 3, 2013, The Rev Kate Wesch preaching.
Simeon and Anna have a lot of wisdom and they can teach us. I know their lives couldn’t have been simple or easy and yet, there they were day in and day out, praying and waiting. A little head cold comes along, a little adversity, trials, and stress, and I fall apart. As author Lauren Winner puts it and I agree, “I wish I had the eyes and faith that Simeon had, the eyes and faith to recognize God’s redemption in unlikely bodies. I wish I had the eyes to see God’s redeeming work in the world around me, and the faith to proclaim it. How can I become a person who can recognize God’s unfolding redemption, and respond with Simeon’s words?”
December 25, 2012 The Rev Doyt Conn preaching
Merry Christmas. It seems we are the group that got up and got our presents opened this morning and now are ready for church. This is a nice service; small and quiet, as we gather here to consider the child born in the manger who changed our world
November 18, 2012, The Rev Doyt Conn preaching
The sermon today is about the problem of pain and suffering. Don’t worry, it’s not another stewardship sermon.