Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 25, 2007

Scripture:

We all love Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus, right? Most of us grew up hearing it read, probably in the King James Version, at Christmas time at church and maybe even at home. It is the foundation of our image of Christmas. The crèches that we put up are based mostly on Luke’s story. We may take the wise men out of Matthew’s story and add them to our Lukan display, but basically our crèches are a depiction of Luke’s birth story. It is a truly magnificent story. Every time I read it I am filled with good memories of Christmases past, and I imagine many of you are too. Beyond that, every time I read it I discover new meaning in it.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 23, 2007

Scripture:

This Advent season we are considering three aspects of what it means to call ourselves disciples of Christ. Specifically, we are considering three commitments that Christ expects of his disciples that are suggested by three of this year’s Advent readings from the prophet Isaiah. We have considered the demand of discipleship that our lives be devoted to peace and to justice. We saw that those are political demands, although not necessarily partisan ones. Today we consider a demand of the life of faith that isn’t at all political. It is personal.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 9, 2007

Scripture:

This Advent season we are considering three aspects of what it means to call ourselves disciples of Christ. Specifically, we are considering three commitments that Christ expects of his disciples that are suggested by three of this year’s Advent readings from the prophet Isaiah. Last week we talked about peace—peace for our souls and peace in the world. In two weeks, after a break next week for our children’s Christmas pageant, we will consider Christ’s demand that we care for one another and for all whom we encounter in life. Today we consider the demand that the life of a disciple of Christ be a life devoted to justice.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 2, 2007

Scripture:

It’s Advent, that time on the church calendar set aside for preparing for the birth of Jesus Christ. In a few weeks we will celebrate his birth as good news of great joy for all people, and of course it is. It’s the best news that there ever was or ever could be. In Jesus God comes to us as one of us to bring us the good news of God’s unconditional grace. We call him Lord and Savior, and we call ourselves his disciples.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 25, 2007

Scripture:

On the church calendar today is known as Christ the King Sunday or, in the more politically correct terminology that the UCC uses, Reign of Christ Sunday. This day has a special name on the church calendar, but it’s not much of a special day for us. I know about it mostly because I preach from the lectionary, and that’s about the only reason I know about it. Still, this being Reign of Christ, or Christ the King Sunday got me thinking about the question of what it could possibly mean to call Christ a king, or even to say that he reigns. That there is something odd in these expressions is suggested, I think, by the way the lectionary gives us part of Luke’s account of Jesus’ Crucifixion as the Gospel reading for today. Did they make a mistake and think that we’d jumped ahead to Good Friday? Not likely.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 18, 2007

Scripture:

This week we celebrate Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving Day is not actually a church day. It is a day on our secular calendars not on the church calendar. Christians in other countries are not especially marking a day of thanksgiving this week. In Canada, for example. Thanksgiving is marked in early October; and, as far as I know, most countries don’t have a special day for it at all. I suppose the reason there isn’t a special Thanksgiving Day on the church calendar is that thanksgiving is an appropriate attitude for Christians to have every day. Still, Thanksgiving Day is very much a part of our culture, and the Revised Common Lectionary that we use does includes a set of readings for Thanksgiving, which it usually doesn’t for secular holidays.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 11, 2007

Scripture:

Around the early 1840s a man named William Miller caused quite a stir in the northeastern part of this country. He was a successful farmer, but more importantly for our purposes he was a Baptist layperson and a self-proclaimed, self-taught amateur student of the Bible. Like so many Christians before him and since he understood the Bible only literally. And of course he understood it to be the literal Word of God. Like a lot of other self-trained Biblical literalists around the same time he decided that he could decipher a truth from the Bible that no one else—especially not the academically trained Biblical experts—had ever deciphered from it before. He decided that by taking literally the ages given for various people in the Bible, deciding that in the Bible one day always meant one year, and by applying other obscure and, frankly, ridiculous interpretive principles of his own devising he could determine the precise date of the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 4, 2007

Scripture:

I don’t know if I’m sort of odd this way, but I frankly don’t have very many clear, specific memories from before I was about eleven years old. I do however have one very faint memory that involves our reading from Luke this morning, the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus. I think, although I couldn’t swear to it, that one summer when I was around eight or nine—in grade school at any event, my brother and I attended the vacation bible school at First Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, in Eugene, to which our next door neighbors belonged. Their daughter was one year older than Pete and me and was a friend of ours, so I suppose we went because she invited us. I have this vague recollection that the program of the VBS included our acting out the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus. Recall that a key element in the story is that Zacchaeus is short, so to see Jesus over the crowd he had to climb a tree.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 28, 2007

Scripture:

It’s probably hard for us to realize how central a role the Jerusalem Temple played on the life of ancient Israel. Back then the people didn’t have churches or synagogues. There was only one real church, the Temple in Jerusalem. It was the only place you could really worship. You could pray other places of course, and people did. You could read scripture other places of course, and people did. But the only place you could truly worship the way God wanted you to worship, the way God’s Law given to God’s people through Moses so long ago said you should worship was in the Temple. More than that even, God was present in the Temple in a special way.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 21, 2007

Scripture:

Even somebody who knew nothing about Christianity or about this church who came in here, looked around, and sat through a worship service would pretty quickly get the impression that the Bible must be pretty important to us. After all, we have a lot of copies of it out where people can see them and pick them up and read them if they want. They’re in every pew. There are a bunch of them in the Fellowship Hall. There’s a big one on the lectern up front. And in the course of the worship service some people up front read some short bits out of it and some guy who’s dressed kinda funny spends what seems like too much time talking about one of those bits trying to explain what it means. All that is pretty obvious.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 14, 2007

Scripture:

We live, we are told, in the "information age."  We're all connected to "the information superhighway."  Most of think that we can never have too much information about anything.  We are urged at every turn to get as much information as we can about any matter whatsoever before we make any decision whatsoever.  We are told, for example, to be well informed patients, getting as much information as we can about our medical condition before we make a treatment decision.  That's good advice, although I imagine some of us take it so far that it drives our doctors nuts. 

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 23, 2007

Scripture:

The prophet Jeremiah lived in a very troubled time and place. He lived of course in the land that we know as Israel in the late 7th and early 6th centuries BCE, a couple of decades on either side of the year 600 BCE. The little kingdom of Judah, with its capital at Jerusalem, was the only remaining Hebrew kingdom. There had been another one, the kingdom of Israel to the north of Judah; but the great Assyrian Empire from the east had destroyed Israel more than 100 years earlier.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 16, 2007

Scripture:

Many of us I imagine remember that old Pete Seeger song that was popular back when some of us were protesting another protracted American war abroad. Through a series of additional questions and answers the song portrays the futility and inanity of humanity’s endless cycle of war upon war, in which, traditionally, our young men die and our young women become widows. After each verse Seeger again asks that haunting question: “When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?”

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 9, 2007

Scripture:

The Bible is our book. It is the book Christians have used for more than a millennium as their guide to the truth and as the basis of their faith. It is the book we use in public worship and private devotion. Some of us see it as the literal, infallible word of God. Others of us don’t, but even for those of us who don’t see it that way the Bible is an indispensable tool. We wouldn’t truly be Christians without it. Yet how many times have you read a passage in the Bible and failed to have it speak to you? Or how many times have you read a passage and thought: I like this bit. I get that part. It speaks to me. But this other bit down here, that I don’t get at all? Or, that I just don’t believe? It even strikes me as wrong?

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 26, 2007

Scripture:

The passage we just heard is known as a prophetic call story. This one is Jeremiah’s. Most of the prophets have a call story. Sometimes it’s as brief as something like “the word of the Lord came to me.” Sometimes it’s a lot more elaborate. Isaiah’s is probably the most elaborate. It’s set in the throne room of God, with flying beasts, clouds of smoke, and burning coals. Jeremiah’s isn’t that elaborate, but it has some very interesting features that got me thinking about some things this past week—always a dangerous activity I’m sure you’ll agree. Still, I want to share some of those thoughts with you this morning.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 19, 2007

Scripture:

When you read Hebrew Scripture, especially the history books and the Prophets, one of the principal dynamics, or as the great UCC Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls them, trajectories, that you discover is the political history of the Hebrew people from the creation of the kingdom by David around the year 1000 BCE through and beyond the Babylonian exile that began around 586 BCE.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 12, 2007

Scripture:

Every Sunday we and countless other Christians of nearly every variety gather together to do something called worship. The roots of that spiritual practice go way, way back in the Judeo-Christian tradition. They go back so far that when you get back to the beginning, worship looks very, very different from our worship today, so different in fact that we hardly recognize it as worship at all.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 5, 2007

Scripture:

I really don’t want to be morbid about it, but I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently. I experienced one of those confluences of events that happens from time to time that all point to something in a way you can’t ignore. This time it was death. First, there was the death not quite two weeks ago of our beloved sister in Christ Joyce Smith. Then there was the fifth anniversary of the death of my first wife Francie last Tuesday. Then there were the readings from the lectionary for today from Ecclesiastes and Luke. Finally, last Wednesday, there was the bridge collapse in Minneapolis that abruptly ended the lives of several people and that could have killed a whole lot more than it actually did.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 29, 2007

Scripture:

Did any of you notice some time back that I changed the line I usually use to invite you to offer your prayer concerns during our prayers of the people? It’s a subtle change, but I think it’s an important one. I used to say “For what shall we pray this morning?” A year or so ago—I can never remember when things happened any more—I began to say instead “How shall we pray this morning?” I didn’t have this morning’s passage from Luke specifically in mind when I made that change, but that passage and the important question that it raises reminded me of it and of why I made it.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 22, 2007

Scripture:

We all know the term “conventional wisdom,” right? It’s the knowledge of what’s true and of what’s right that we all share without even thinking about it. It’s the basic assumptions about life that we don’t so much intentionally learn as we acquire as though by osmosis out of the air we breathe as we grow up. We don’t often question our conventional wisdom. Indeed, it rarely occurs to us that there is anything about it to question; and we think people who do are eccentric at best and dangerously deranged at worst. Yet it is also true that the greatest minds humanity has ever produced have always questioned the conventional wisdom of their day.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 15, 2007

Scripture:

Of course we all know the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We’ve heard it all our lives. It is one of the many great literary creations of the author of the Gospel of Luke. It’s about a kind man called a Samaritan—whatever that is—who helped an injured man when a priest and a Levite—whoever they are—ignored him and passed him by. The story means we should help people who need help, right? Well, yes. Of course that’s right—as far as it goes. That’s the obvious meaning of the story, but there’s one line in the story that has always puzzled me.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 1, 1007

Scripture:

Although as a general matter I don’t dislike the writings of the Apostle Paul as much as some of my colleagues do, and although his letters contain some passages that are foundational for my own theology, I have never liked the way he ascribes every sin, everything evil, to the “the flesh” and everything good, noble, and true to “the Spirit.”

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 24, 2007

Scripture:

This is not the sermon I had intended to give this morning...

Friday evening my daughter Mary and I went to a concert of the Seattle Men’s Chorus titled “Scared Faithless.” For any of you who don’t know, the Seattle Men’s Chorus is made up of and is run by and for mostly gay men. It is a significance force in Seattle’s gay culture, and it is one of the premiere men’s choruses in the country. Its musical director is Dennis Coleman, who is also the choir director of our sister congregation Bellevue First Congregational UCC. The general theme of this concert was gay and lesbian people’s experience with religion and the churches.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 10, 2007

Scripture:

I suppose we’ve all heard the saying “life is uncertain—eat dessert first.” It’s meant as I joke, I suppose, an excuse to eat our dessert before we’ve finished our Brussels sprouts. I’m actually quite happy to have an excuse to eat my dessert before I’ve finished my Brussels sprouts because I don’t particularly care for Brussels sprouts. We laugh when we hear it in this silly saying, but over these past few weeks I’ve had driven home to me in particularly powerful and painful ways the truth of the saying’s thesis, that life is uncertain.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 20, 2007

Scripture:

One of the amazing things about great Bible stories is that as we read them over and over again they keep revealing new truths that we have never discerned before. We can think they mean one thing; then a new layer of meaning emerges, and we see the story in a whole new light.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 29, 2007

Scripture:

It’s everyone’s favorite Psalm, Psalm 23. Many of us memorized it as kids, probably in its King James version. It’s beautiful. It’s familiar. It’s comforting. Yet it struck me when I read it again this past week that I’ve never preached on the 23rd Psalm before.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 22, 2007

Scripture:

We are in the Easter season. Two weeks ago on Easter itself I talked to you about how the first image of Easter is not the risen Christ but the empty tomb. In these weeks after Easter, however, we are reading the Gospel stories of the Resurrection appearances of the risen Christ. We had two of them this morning, the appearance to Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus that is set some significant amount of time after Easter and John’s story of Jesus appearing to seven disciples at the Sea of Galilee, here called the Sea of Tiberius, soon after Easter.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 15, 2007

Scripture:

We all love the Bible, right? I mean, it is our book. It is the book we use in communal worship and in personal devotion. It is the only source we have for information about Jesus, the one we call Lord and Savior. It contains our foundational story. Without it, we wouldn’t be Christians. Yet for all that there are things in it that drive me nuts.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 8, 2007

Scripture:

I don’t know about you, but when I think of Easter the image that first comes to my mind is a vision of the risen Christ. He is dressed in radiant garments, and he himself sort of glows. He looks something like the Christ in the window over our front door. He has his hand raised in blessing, and he is saying: “Fear not.” He is beatific, serene, rather other-worldly, as I guess you’d expect of someone who has just gotten up out of his grave. That’s my personal Easter icon.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 6, 2007

Scripture:

It’s such an odd thing, although maybe “odd” is too mild a word for it. It’s such a bizarre thing, such an fantastic and improbable thing. We Christians follow a crucified Savior.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 5, 2007

Scripture:

Tonight we gather to commemorate that night so long ago when Jesus gathered with his friends to celebrate the Passover and instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist. There has been a lot of ink, and a lot of blood, spilled over the meaning of that sacrament, but one thing is clear. Whatever else the Eucharist may be, it is above all else a remembrance of Jesus.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 1, 2007

Scripture:

It never ceases to amaze me how I can read a Bible passage that I’ve read many times before and have something new jump out at me, something that was always there but that I’d never really thought much about before. It happened this week when I read Luke’s Passion narrative, part of which we just heard. In five brief verses, Luke 23:35-39, Luke has different people say three times to Jesus: “If you are the Messiah, the king of the Jews, save yourself from the cross.” First it’s the leaders of the people standing by watching the execution. Then it’s the soldiers who are carrying out the execution. Then it’s one of the criminals being executed along side Jesus.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 25, 2007

Scripture:

Five years ago yesterday, March 24, 2002, was a remarkable day in my life...

Last Sunday I shared with you my vision of how far we have come in these past five years together. Today I want to share with you at least part of a vision of where we go from here. And somehow I feel like I got some divine help with that task. I’ve known for a while that that’s what I wanted to do on this Sunday, so I approached the lectionary readings for today with a specific question in mind.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 18, 2007

Scripture:

Five years ago yesterday, March 17, 2002, was a pivotal day in my life. I frankly don’t remember much of it. I remember being here leading worship with those of you who were here then for the first time. It’s hard to imagine now, but the only ones of you I knew even a little bit were the members of the search committee. And Manny. I’d met Manny at various Conference functions before that day. I remember waiting here in the sanctuary with my wife Francie of blessed memory and our two adult children while you repaired to the Fellowship Hall. I remember being called into the Fellowship Hall and being told that you had voted unanimously to call me as your pastor. I remember Ron Park hitting me up to give a talk at Monroe Kiwanis ten days later and telling me exactly what he wanted me to say. Most of all I remember the warm welcome you gave me and my family.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 11, 2007

Scripture:

Have you ever noticed that some Bible verses appear to say more than they really do? I mean, have you ever read a Bible passage, thought it was really good and meaningful, then looked at it more closely only to find that it raises more questions than it answers? I had that kind of reaction to part of our reading from Isaiah this morning. I really like verses 8 and 9 of Isaiah 55, the ones that read “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 4, 2007

Scripture:

In a series of sermons a while back I tried to convince you that we’re all prophets. I said it doesn’t matter that we’re just ordinary people and that we aren’t worthy of the high calling of prophet. We’re precisely the kind of people God calls as prophets, so we can’t get out of it by pleading inability or unworthiness. In this little corner of God’s creation we are the prophets of an emerging Christianity, a progressive, Open and Affirming Christianity, a liberated Christianity that is not bogged down in an untenable Biblical literalism.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 25, 2007

Scripture:

When I was born, the doctors told my parents I would not live through the first night. The Christmas my twin brother and I were four I got up before he did, went out into the living room, saw all the loot under the tree, went back to our room, and announced that Santa Claus didn’t come. When I was eleven and living with my family in Berlin Germany our German landlady tried to put the red armband from her late husband’s very real Nazi Party uniform on me, and I wouldn’t let her do it. When I was in high school I stopped going to Eugene First Congregational Church because I decided that all of those good people were hypocrites.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 18, 2007

Scripture:

Well, it’s Transfiguration Sunday again, one of those things we preachers are expected to preach on every year. And the Transfiguration is such an odd story. It’s such an odd word. Transfiguration. What in heaven’s name is that supposed to mean? And what is it supposed to have to do with us? I mean, so something really weird happened to Jesus once a long time ago. So what? Why should it matter to us? Well, I’m quite sure I don’t have any definitive answer to those questions. I do, however, have some thoughts on the subject that I want to share with you. So bear with me as I try to make some sense out of the Transfiguration.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 11, 2007

Scripture:

You’ve all heard of the Sermon on the Mount, right? And I imagine you know the Beatitudes, those sayings of Jesus that begin the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” Mt. 5:3, 5, and 9 NRSV And some others. They are among the most famous lines in all the New Testament.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 4, 2007

Scripture:

The last couple of Sundays I’ve been talking to you about our call to be prophets. I don’t have long to talk to you this morning because of all the other things we’re doing in this service—both receiving new members and celebrating Communion—but there are some more things I want to say about our call to be prophets. They are suggested by our Scripture readings this morning. In those readings Isaiah and Peter are called to be prophets, or at least to be a prophet in Isaiah’s case and a Disciple of Jesus in Peter’s, which amounts to much the same thing. In these stories both Isaiah and Peter have profound experiences of the Divine.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 28, 2007

Scripture:

Do you think of yourselves as prophets? Probably not. I recall once saying in a sermon here that you’re not prophets and I’m not a prophet. Well, today I want to reconsider that statement. It seems I’ve changed my mind, or at least I’ve changed it to this extent: I have become convinced that whether we actually are prophets or not, we are all called to be prophets. You ane, and I am. Now that may seem an audacious statement to you, or worse. We’re just ordinary people, after all, and prophets are great people from long ago who could see into the future, or at least that’s who we tend to think the prophets were.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 21, 2007

Scripture:

Earlier this past week I sent a pastoral letter to those of you on the church’s e mail list with the subject line “bad religion.” Copies of it are available in the Fellowship Hall for those of you who didn’t get it. For those of you who have read it, some of this sermon is going to be a bit repetitive; but the point I want to make, or better, the vision that has grasped me this past week, is so important, or at least I think it is so important, that I can’t say it too often. Religion in general and Christianity in particular are under attack today, and the fault lies not with the critics of religion but with the religions themselves, Christianity most definitely included.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 14, 2007

Scripture:

Today we mark the Baptism of Christ, and in a few minutes we will again participate in a ritual renewal of our baptismal vows. That’s the bit where I sprinkle water on you. So this past week I had occasion to re-read a couple of Bible texts about baptism, the two we just heard read this morning. When I did what struck me in particular was something they both mention that I have never paid much attention to before.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 7, 2007

Scripture:

One of the odd things about Matthew’s story that we just heard is that the tradition isn’t content to take it as it is. If I asked you how many kings there are in the story, you’d probably answer three. Some of you could even name them: Kaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. Yet in the story as Matthew wrote it there is only one king, and he’s the villain of the piece. His name is Herod.