Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
Dec. 28, 2008

Scripture:

Well, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks, hasn’t it. I’ve live in this part of the country most of my life, and I’ve never seen anything like it. We had temperatures that I haven’t seen since the year I lived in Moscow—Russian, not Idaho. We had more snow than I think I saw even Russia, although that may be a bit of an exaggeration. We had to cancel all of our church activities, including most sadly our Christmas Eve service that I and so many of us love so well. On a personal note, if you’ve been getting my emails you know that I was first snowed into my house in Sultan, then snowed out of it. The only way my wife Jane and I could spend any time together on Christmas was to meet at my son’s house in Seattle, and I could only do that because he’s got a big 4x4 pickup trick and was willing to come out to Sultan to get me. I’m sure many of you, and many of our members and friends who aren’t here this morning, have similar stories of being stranded or other stories of hardships caused by the snow.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 14, 2008

Scripture:

In the first two sermons in this three-part sermon series on Mary of Nazareth I have suggested ways to see Mary that are quite different from the traditional Christian view of her as meek, mild, obedient, and even submissive. I have suggested that we see her as the model of liberated womanhood and as a prophet. There is, however, another way in which the tradition has seen her that I have not yet addressed. In this way of seeing her the tradition has, at least in part, gotten it right. One of the traditional images of Mary is the woman of sorrows. In Latin she’s called the Mater Dolorosa, the Sorrowing Mother. One of the great treasures of western music is Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater,” set to a Latin text on the Mater Dolorosa. One of the great treasures of western art is Michelangelo’s Pieta, an emotionally wrenching sculpture of Mary cradling the lifeless body of her crucified son Jesus in her arms. Mary is in many ways a model of female humanity. Female humanity is of course full humanity, and full humanity includes the experiences of pain, loss, grief, and death. The Biblical image of Mary includes this aspect of Mary’s humanity in all its fullness and all its pain.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 7, 2008

Scripture:

Last week, in the first sermon of this three part Advent sermon series on Mary of Nazareth, I suggested that we see Mary, the mother of Jesus, not as the meek, mild, obedient woman Christian tradition has turned her into but as a strong, morally autonomous, independent woman who does her own thinking, her own questioning, her own discerning, and her own deciding. It’s a very different way of thinking about her than the Christian tradition has transmitted to us, but then the Christian tradition, as valuable as it is in many respects, has gotten so many things wrong one hardly knows where to start to enumerate them all. It’s distortion of who Mary was is just another example of those errors. Today I want to add another dimension to that revisionist portrait of Mary as liberated woman that I began to paint last week. This new dimension comes from the passage from Luke that we just heard. That passage is known as the Magnificat, because its first word in Latin is Magnificat. The new dimension I want to add is the dimension of Mary as prophet.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 30, 2008

Scripture:

One of the things that strikes many of us who are life-long Protestants as odd and, frankly, unattractive about both the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox versions of Christianity is their devotion to the Virgin Mary. They call it “Mariology.” they say they “venerate” Mary, they don’t worship her; but to many of us it sure looks a lot like Mariolatry, that is, it looks like they worship her as God when they should be worshipping Jesus Christ and the God we know in and through Jesus Christ. Now, I certainly don’t want to turn us into a bunch of Mary worshippers. Far from it. I do think, however, that we Protestants are in some ways spiritually impoverished by our total rejection of Mary as a figure of the faith. I think that it is appropriate for us to ask: Are there important things that we can learn from the Biblical accounts of Mary? I believe that it is appropriate in this Advent season that begins today for us to ask in particular whether there are important things that we can take from the stories about Mary in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth. There aren’t very many of those stories. Only Matthew and Luke have any stories about Jesus’ birth at all, and those Gospel accounts contain only a few passages that deal with Mary. Yet Christianity is so spiritually impoverished by its one-sided maleness that I think it will do us good during Advent this year to take a look at those few passages, to look to see what the woman Mary of Nazareth has to say to us. So in my three Advent sermons this year—three not four because one of the Sundays will be devoted to our children’s Christmas play—I will consider Mary. Today we begin with the two Gospel accounts of what the Christian tradition calls “the Annunciation,” the announcement by an angel from God that Mary will bear a child who is to be the Son of God.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 23, 2008

Scripture:

In our reading from Mark this morning we have a story about a hole in a roof that turned out to be a very good thing. Some men wanted to get their paralyzed friend in to see Jesus, but the crowds around Jesus’ house were so thick that they couldn’t get close. We don’t usually think of Jesus as having a house. We think of him as a wandering teacher and healer, but in this story he has a house; and the house, of course, had a roof. Buildings in Galilee in Jesus’ day were made of mud bricks, and their roofs were sod. So these guys who wanted to see if Jesus could heal their paralyzed friend climbed up on the roof and dug a hole through it.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 16, 2008

Scripture:

When you work with the Bible as much as I do, sometimes there are coincidences so remarkable that you’re tempted to call them providential and not mere coincidences at all. We’ve got one of those providential coincidences in our lectionary readings this week. Our country just elected a new President whose first name is Barack. In our reading from the book of Judges this morning we read of the prophetess Deborah, who is acting as judge for her people. A judge like Deborah was the closest thing Israel had to a political ruler in those days before the establishment of the monarchy. The people were being oppressed by a Canaanite king named Hazor and his military commander Sisera. So Deborah summoned her military commander to go fight Sisera and save the people, and Deborah’s military commander was named—Barak. This Barak isn’t spelled exactly the way President-elect Obama spells his first name, but still. It’s the same name. So how could I pass up a chance to use this text in worship today?

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 9, 2008

Scripture:

More than three thousand years ago Joshua, the successor to Moses as the leader of the Israelites, asked the people a question that was crucial in that time and place: Which gods will you serve? It might seem a strange question, but his people had a lot of choices when it came to gods. Our reading from Joshua, where we hear of the question he asked, mentions at least three choices that the people had, namely, the gods of Mesopotamia far to the east whence Abraham had come many years earlier, the gods of Egypt, from which the Israelites had just recently escaped, and Yahweh, the actual god of the Israelites, referred to in our reading as “the LORD.” The people had at least one other choice too, one that Joshua doesn’t mention but one that a lot of Israelites chose over the years, namely, the gods of the Canaanites, here called the Amorites, in whose land the Israelites were living. In our story from Joshua, all the people say we choose Yahweh, the LORD, our God. Joshua says OK, but you’d better mean it. It’s not going to go well for you if you say you will serve Yahweh, and then you don’t.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 2, 2008

Scripture:

This morning we stand on the eve of one of the most important events in our life together as Americans, a general election in a Presidential year. Several things have happened this election year that raise for us a very important question. It was raised for me in a very stark way recently by a radio ad by the people supporting Initiative 1000 here in Washington state. Something in that ad really bothered me. It said that “out of state religious leaders” are trying to “impose their will” on the people of Washington by speaking out against that initiative. When I heard that I thought: I’m not sure I agree with those out of state religious leaders, whoever they are, but since when was it inappropriate for people of faith to speak out of their deeply held values on issues of public interest? Since when did we lose our right to defend our values in the public arena just because we are people of faith or even “religious leaders,” whatever that means? Since when did people of faith speaking out in defense of their values constitute trying to impose those values on other people any more than anyone else expressing an opinion on public issues does? I may or may not agree with a public statement by another person of faith. I often disagree with those statements, but I will never deny anyone’s right to speak up in defense of their values.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 26, 2008

Scripture:

I think it’s safe to say that all of us have what theologians call our “canon within the canon.” Canon—one n in the middle, not two—means the books that are considered part of the Bible. Having our own canon within the canon means that there are certain verses that sum up all of Scripture for us, that say in a concise way what it’s all about for us. I have a few Bible passages that act that way for me. Mine include Micah 4:3, they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; Micah 6:8, What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?; Matthew 5:44, love your enemy; Matthew 5:39, do not resist evil with violence; and perhaps most of all Romans 8:38-39, neither death nor life not anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 19, 2008

Scripture:

Today I want to give you a different take on the famous “Render unto Caesar” story that we just heard than I gave you the last time it came up in the lectionary, a take that I think is particularly relevant in this high political season that we are currently experiencing in our nation, or perhaps suffering would be a better word given how prolonged and how nasty our political campaigns have become. It’s OK that it’s a different take. Great Bible stories like this can have more than one meaning.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 19, 2008

Scripture:

Three weeks ago we marked International Day of Peace during our worship on Sunday morning. Our focus was on external peace, peace in the world. External peace, the absence of war and the practice of nonviolent advocacy for justice, is of course profoundly important, and it is the calling of the Christian. There is, however, another kind of peace, a peace that is every bit as important as world peace. It is internal peace, peace in our hearts, peace in our souls. The two kinds of peace are not unrelated. The Buddhist tradition, in which there is a great deal of wisdom, for example teaches that the way to peace in the world is through peace in the souls of individuals. Moreover, if your experience is anything like mine, you know that internal peace is every bit as rare as peace in the world.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 5, 2008

Scripture:

Because I’m about to say some things about the Ten Commandments that some of you might not like, let me say right up front that if the Ten Commandments are important to you, that’s fine. I have no desire to take them away from you if you find them particularly meaningful. A lot of people do. Let me also say right up front, however, that I am not one of those people. I think that far too much is made of the Ten Commandments, especially by people who want to post them in courthouses, an act that my legal training convinces me is a clear violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. So when the Ten Commandments came up in the lectionary for this week my first thought was that there was no way I was going to preach on them. But then I thought maybe my resistance to them was telling me something. Maybe it was telling me that I needed to spend some time with them to see if I’ve been missing something all these years by dismissing them as flippantly as I usually do. So I did. I went over them again slowly, carefully, trying to draw out of them something of value, or at least to understand better why they seem so important to so many people and so unimportant to me. This sermon is the result of that time spent pondering the Ten Commandments anew.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 28, 2008

Scripture:

Several months ago some of us from this church went to a lecture in Seattle by the great contemporary Christian theologian John Dominic Crossan about St. Paul. During the question and answer time after the lecture I asked him about a passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans that troubles me and that seems to contradict much of what Crossan had said about Paul in his lecture. He responded by saying that the first thing we have remember about Paul is that sometimes he—and I’ll clean up the language here so I’m not swearing from the pulpit—said some very foolish things. Now, I don’t think that the passage we just heard from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi is foolishness, or at least I don’t think that it is only foolishness. Indeed, I think that it speaks some very profound truth. I do think, however, that some of what Paul says here runs the risk of becoming foolishness—or even a lot worse than foolishness—if we take it too literally and too simply. Because I think that this passage contains both profound truth and profound danger, let me walk you through these verses from Philippians to try to discover both the truth and the danger, so that we can live into the truth and avoid the danger.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 21, 2008

Scripture:

I love Jonah. He’s so much like me. Unfortunately, our reading from the Book of Jonah this morning picks up in the middle of his story, so let me remind you of the part of the story that comes before the part we just heard. God comes to Jonah and says go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach the word of God to them. Now, Nineveh, that great city, was the capital of the Assyrian Empire; and the Assyrian Empire was the mortal enemy of the Hebrew states of Israel and Judah. Israel and Judah lived in constant fear of Assyria. So Jonah says no to God. He says there’s no way I’m going to preach your word to the hated and feared enemy. So instead of going east from Israel to Nineveh, which was in present day Iraq, Jonah boards a west-bound ship headed for Tarshish, in Spain. God says go preach to the enemy, and Jonah says I’m outta here. Forget it. No way, Yahweh. So God stirs up a big storm, Jonah ends up overboard, and gets swallowed by a great fish, popularly called a whale. Eventually the great fish vomits him up on the beach. So he finally says all right already. I’ll go; and go he does, off to Nineveh, that great city, to preach the word of God to the enemy.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 14, 2008

Scripture:

We don’t get it. We Christians don’t get it. Almost no one gets it. The Gospel truth is that God is a God who forgives. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts. God forgives. Everyone. Always. No matter what. That’s a big part of what it means to say that God is a God of grace. Forgiveness is a part of grace, and if grace is in any way conditional, it isn’t grace. So there are and can be no conditions on God’s forgiveness. And we don’t get it. We keep insisting on making God’s forgiveness depend on something, often repentance. We keep insisting that people, ourselves included, have to do something before God can forgive us. Many, actually I suspect most, Christians think God forgives only Christians, that having the “correct” faith is a condition to receiving forgiveness. People balk at the idea that God’s forgiveness is free and for everyone.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 7, 2008

Scripture:

One of my favorite words is “oxymoron.” It means a word or phrase that contains a contradiction, that seems to contradict itself. Like “jumbo shrimp.” Oxymorons are fun because they sound like nonsense, yet they sometimes draw our attention to a truth that we might otherwise miss. We’ve got an oxymoron in this morning’s reading from Romans. In that reading St. Paul tells us to “put on the armor of light.” The phrase “armor of light” is an oxymoron. It contradicts itself. It says light is armor. But what is armor? It is a protective covering, in Paul’s day probably of bronze or wood and leather, in our day probably of Kevlar or some other penetration-resistant synthetic material. They key to something being armor is that phrase “penetration-resistant.” Armor is there to prevent penetration by a weapon, in Paul’s day a spear or an arrow, in our day a bullet. And what is light? Nothing, really, True, modern science has discovered that light has mass, that it has weight. But Paul didn’t know that, and even if he had it wouldn’t have mattered. Light doesn’t have enough substance to deflect anything, not even a feather, much less a spear or a bullet. Light simply will not work as armor. The phrase “armor of light” is an oxymoron. It contradicts itself. It is nonsense.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 31, 2008

Scripture:

As I read this morning’s passage from Moses I was struck by how different Moses’ world was from ours. It could hardly have been more different from ours. In Moses’ time, around 1250 BCE or so, most of what we know as history hadn’t happened yet. No one would even begin to think of the world the way we think of the world for centuries or even millennia to come. Anything approaching a modern scientific understanding of the universe was three thousand years in the future. Jesus, whom we think of as having lived so very, very long ago, was over a thousand years in the future. The Hebrew people, who would eventually give the world monotheism, the belief in one God, still believed that there were a great many gods and wouldn’t develop true monotheism for something like 750 years. Democracy as we know it, or even as the Greeks would come to know it centuries later, hadn’t occurred to anyone and would have struck everyone as sheer madness. Slavery was universally accepted as the natural order of things, as was the total domination of men over women. Those ideas wouldn’t change significantly for over 3,000 years. Moses’ world was so different from ours that we can hardly conceive of it, and we sure wouldn’t much like to live in it.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 24, 2008

Scripture:

From the very beginning Christians have had a terrible time figuring out what to do with the world. Christians have had immense difficulty figuring out how to relate to the world, and they have come up with a wide variety of solutions to the problem. One early solution was that of the so-called Desert Fathers, those first Christian monks who, starting in the fourth century CE fled the world into the deserts of Egypt to live isolated and solitary lives of prayer as remote from the world as they could get. Other Christians have tried to rule the world, either as supposedly Christian Emperors or as supposedly Christian Popes. Some Christians have tried to transform the world, the pioneers of Christian liberalism in the Social Gospel movement of the early twentieth century prominent among them. Still other Christians have almost completely capitulated to the world and conflated Christian and worldly values. Think of indications we see all the time that significant numbers of Christians can’t tell the difference between Christian faith and American patriotism. Or think of Joel Osteen and the “God wants you to be rich” movement that attracts so many followers today. And, of course, popular Christianity has come to be about nothing so much as escaping from the world altogether into a blissful life somewhere else after death. All of these responses to the question of how Christians are to relate to the world have been advanced in the name of Jesus Christ and claimed to be Christian.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 17, 2008

Scripture:

The Bible, of course, is full of stories. Whatever else it may be, the Bible is one of the world’s great story books. Most of the time the stories stand pretty much by themselves. The Book of Genesis, for example, doesn’t try to tell us what the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden means. It leaves it up to us to find meaning in it, or to make meaning out of it. Sometimes, however, the Bible will try to tell us what a story or a parable means. A few weeks ago, for example, we heard Jesus’ parable of the sower and the seeds, where Jesus tells of seeds sown on different types of soil and what became of them. After he tells that parable Jesus tells us what it means. The Bible doesn’t give us explanations of its stories very often, but sometimes it does.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 10, 2008

Scripture:

Sometimes the Jesus of the Gospels hardly seems human. Indeed, the point that the Gospel writers wanted us to get from many of the stories they told about him was precisely that he was more than human. So they told stories of him miraculously healing the sick, feeding huge crowds with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish, and even raising the dead. All of them except Luke tell a story of him walking on water. We heard Matthew’s version of that story just now. Clearly no mere mortal could to that. The Gospel writers believed that, even if he wasn’t actually God for all of them the way he was for John, Jesus at least possessed the power of God. I can’t walk on water, and I assume none of you can either, although maybe we’ll find out for sure at the picnic at the Simmons’ home on a lake this afternoon. In Matthew’s story that we just heard, Jesus doesn’t seem very human, what with that walking on water routine and all.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 3, 2008

Scripture:

Have you ever had the experience of reading a Bible verse and thinking: That is so true! It is so obviously true! It is so profoundly true! Why don’t we get it? Why don’t we live it? I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, but I have it every time I read our passage this morning from Isaiah, especially Isaiah 55:2. That verse asks the rhetorical question: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” Every time I hear that verse I think of the life I used to lead. There is a song in the Cole Porter musical “Kiss Me Kate” that some of you may know in which the male lead asks: “Where is the life that late I led?” In that song he laments the loss of a life of freedom and irresponsibility that he led before he got married. Well, unlike this character I don’t at all lament the life that late I led. It was a life of working for that which did not satisfy—money, prestige, social respect. I learned the hard way that all of that is empty, hollow, a sham, and a deceit. It truly does not satisfy. For me, in any event, so far from providing true bread it threatened to starve my soul altogether.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 27, 2008

Scripture:

Sometimes the Bible can be pretty scary, can’t it. Take the last of the several little parables we just heard from the Gospel of Matthew, the one about the net and the fish. The author of the Gospel of Matthew—whoever he was—attributes this parable to Jesus, but according to the Jesus Seminar at least it isn’t really an authentic saying of Jesus. The Jesus Seminar says the parable reflects not the teachings of Jesus but “the necessity of the young Christian movement to mark off its boundaries from the larger world, hence the interest in sorting out the good from the bad.”¹ Be that as it may, there it is, in the Bible, in the New Testament, in one of the Gospels; and it’s really scary. It says that the Kingdom of God is like a fish net that traps both good fish and bad. At the end of time God’s agents will separate the good from the bad and will throw the bad “into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matthew 13:50 Now, I don’t know about you; but I’m not all that certain that in such a scenario I’d be accounted one of the good fish. It seems to me at least as likely that I’d be one of the bad ones cast into the furnace of fire, left there to weep and gnash my teeth for all eternity. It’s a scary thought; and, frankly, it doesn’t really help all that much that the Jesus Seminar says that this isn’t the authentic voice of Jesus. It’s still scary.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 20, 2008

Scripture:

In our reading this morning from Genesis the Patriarch Jacob has an epiphany. You know epiphanies, those sudden brilliant insights, those unexpected manifestations of the presence of God that you sometimes hear about. Jacob’s comes in a dream, as they sometimes do. In his dream he sees a ladder extending from earth up to heaven with angels on it moving easily back and forth between heaven and earth. Then he sees his God Yahweh, in our translation called “the LORD,” standing beside him. That’s an epiphany, a manifestation of God. Yahweh repeats to Jacob the promise he had made several times to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham that he would inherit the land of Canaan and become the ancestor of a multitude of people. Then Jacob wakes up and says: “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it.” So he builds an altar there to Yahweh and names the place Bethel, which in Hebrew means the house of God.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 13, 2008

Scripture:

I’ve long had a fondness for morning glories. You know morning glories, those lovely, white, bell-shaped flowers that grow wild around here? Oh, I know that for gardeners morning glories can be a nuisance. They are aggressive and invasive plants that can be hard to control. But their flowers are so pretty! And here’s the thing I like best about them: They seem to be about the only plants that can stand up to blackberries. That’s where I mostly see them, defiantly thrusting their lovely white flowers out of a threatening mass of thorny, belligerent blackberries. Blackberries are the imperialists of our local flora. They really are out to take over the world. But the morning glories push back. They say: We might not be able to stop you, but you can’t defeat us. We won’t give in. We will thrive right in the midst of your stabbing thorns and your strangling tentacles. And I say: You go, morning glories! Right on!

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 6, 2008

Scripture:

Last Tuesday a fellow who attends our men’s group, a very nice guy who is a friend of one of our members and who is a very conservative Christian, got us to watch a video presentation by a Biblicist Christian who styles himself a world-renowned Bible scholar, though in my mind he is no legitimate scholar at all. This very energetic and glib fellow on the video was trying to convince us that God is the author of the Bible. Now, you can believe that as a matter of faith (although if you do, let me give you a copy of Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book); but this man’s arguments, like all logical arguments for the proposition that God wrote the Bible, are convincing only to someone who already accepts that conclusion. Anyone who doesn’t, who has reasonably well-developed critical faculties, and who knows even the most basic conclusions of the higher contemporary Biblical criticisms, will find these arguments specious and transparently false.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 29, 2008

Scripture:

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I hate the story of God commanding Abraham to kill his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. It is a vicious, brutal, primitive story that in no way reflects the God that I know in my life and that we see principally revealed in Jesus Christ. That God, the one I am convinced is that true God, never would command anyone to kill anyone, and never has. The story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and of Abraham’s willingness to do it is just that, a story. If it is supposed to be a story that reveals something about the nature of God, it isn’t. At least not for us, not today, not if you take it at all literally. Understood literally it has nothing to say to us about the nature of God, and there’s just no way around that conclusion.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 22, 2008

Scripture:

I have said many times from this pulpit, and I have written in various places, that Jesus taught nonviolence. He didn’t teach pacifism exactly. Rather, he taught what Walter Wink, the great contemporary theologian of nonviolence, calls “third way” between violence and pacifism. He taught neither violent resistance nor meek pacifism in the face of evil but rather creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil. There really is no doubt about that assertion. Jesus taught nonviolence, and any contention that he didn’t, be it either a reference to supposed sayings of Jesus that seem to support the use of violence or a resort to classical Christian just war theory, is a departure from Jesus’ actual teachings on the subject.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 15, 2008

Scripture:

As most of you know, I used to be a lawyer. Well, technically I still am, although I don’t know how much longer that will be true. My being a lawyer means, among a lot of other things, that at one time I went to law school. And like everyone else who’s been to law school I took a first year class in the basic law of contracts. Now, you probably think that a contract is a pretty simple thing. Two people agree that one will do one thing and the other will do something else, usually pay money in exchange for what the first person agreed to do. Well, the reason you think a contract is a simple thing is that, unlike me, you’ve never been to law school. The law can make anything complicated—often for good reason, actually, since the law deals with life, and life is pretty complicated—and contracts are no exception. In a law school contracts class you learn about such esoteric concepts as the peppercorn theory of consideration, liquidated damages, capacity to contract, illegal contracts, duress, and the assignability of contracts. Not simple stuff at all.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 8, 2008

Scripture:

Our readings from Hosea and Matthew this morning make a very important point. God does not want our animal sacrifices. In the Hosea God says: “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” Hosea 6:6 NRSV In the Matthew Jesus says: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” Matthew 9:13 NRSV It isn’t obvious because of the translation difference here, but Matthew’s Jesus is actually quoting the line from Hosea. He clearly and intentionally identifies himself here with the Hebrew prophetic tradition in which prophet after prophet says to the people that God really doesn’t want your animal sacrifices. The prophets said it. Jesus said it. So I guess we’d better believe it. No animal sacrifices. So I guess I’ll have to cancel that sheep killing ceremony that I had planned for later in the service. I thought that was what God wanted from us, but I guess it isn’t. Oh, well.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 1, 2008

Scripture:

I’ve told this story elsewhere, so forgive me if you’ve heard it before. I once heard a Fundamentalist preacher on the radio waxing vociferous against the godless heathens who dared to criticize his narrow-minded, I dare say even bigoted view, of Christianity. He was particularly appalled at the notion that some of us have the audacity to express that there are contradictions within the Bible. “I can assure you,” he bellowed, “that there is not one single contradiction in God’s holy word!” My immediate thought was: Has he ever read it? There are so many contradictions in the Bible that one hardly knows where to start to list them all. I certainly won’t try to do that right now, not that I could in any event. I’ll just mention one of them that is contained in our Scripture readings for this morning.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 25, 2008

Scripture:

In the tenth century BCE the great Hebrew kings David and his son Solomon built a kingdom that was as large as Israel ever was or ever has been. It stretched farther north, east, and south than present day Israel and included land in present day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. The kingdom of David and Solomon wasn’t exactly one of the mighty empires of the ancient Middle East, but by Israelite standards it was big and powerful. To the people of that time clearly God was showering favor and blessings upon Israel, its people, and God’s anointed ones as they were called, the kings themselves.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 18, 2008

Scripture:

This is the first time I’ve preached on a topic that someone else selected for me, so this sermon may be a bit different from most. The Collegium of Officers of the United Church of Christ has asked us parish pastors to preach on racism today. As near as I can tell, the Collegium of Officers is the UCC’s version of the old Soviet Politburo. It is the collective body of the denominations four top leaders led by Chairman—I mean President and General Minister—John Thomas. They want us to preach on racism, and who am I to argue with the Politburo—I mean the Collegium. So, for what it’s worth, racism it is. And because my denomination has asked me to speak on it, I’m going to tell what I know to be the truth of American racism with no holds barred, or at least that is my intention. Some of what I have to say may be difficult for us white people to hear, but perhaps it should be. And before I start there’s something I need to say to Manny, Shawna, and anyone else here this morning who isn’t white: I apologize in advance that this sermon is directed mainly to us white people in the congregation. It’s what most of us are, and my white experience is the only experience from which I can speak. I pray only that I may speak as a white ally of the victims of racism everywhere. Amen.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 11, 2008

Scripture:

Last weekend, as many of you know, I attended the annual meeting of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. Some of you have heard me complain about those meetings being boring, and some of them have been. This one had its boring moments too, of course, but it also had some good times and some useful events. It felt especially good this year to reconnect with many of my friends from around the Conference and from Seattle U. There were useful workshops, and I have passed along or will pass along some material from those gatherings to some of you. Most especially, the closing worship on Sunday morning was touching and inspiring. I sang in the annual meeting choir, led this year by Dennis Coleman, choir director at First Congregational UCC Bellevue and director of the Seattle Men’s Chorus. That was a special treat, as was partaking of Communion, for which Manny baked the bread for all of us, without presiding myself for a change.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 4, 2008

Scripture:

The earliest Christians thought that their world was a mess. Indeed, in many ways it was a mess. The Roman Empire, the mightiest empire the world had ever known up to that time, ruled their world with an iron fist. There were to be sure some benefits from Roman rule. The Roman emperors didn’t make the trains run on time the way their remote successor and would-be imitator Mussolini did. There were no trains. But the emperors did the first century equivalent of making the trains run on time. They built roads that connected all parts of the Empire. And they managed, for a time at least, to keep those roads rather safe. They brought the most advanced technology of the day to remote corners of the Empire. They had a legal system that was, within the limits of Imperial rule, quite rational and workable. There were indeed advantages to living under Roman rule.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 27, 2008

Scripture:

Have you ever noticed how when we’re getting to know someone new, and they’re getting to know us, one of the questions that’s always asked is where do you live or where are you from? It’s not that we think we’re likely ever to go to that person’s home, or that they’re likely ever to come to ours. It’s just that where we live, where we’re from, is a bit part of our identity, of who we are.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 20, 2008

Scripture:

“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6 NRSV Pretty clear, isn’t it? Jesus is the only way. To get to God, you have to go through Jesus. The only way to get to God is to believe in Jesus. That’s what it says, right? And that’s certainly what Jesus meant, isn’t it? After all, our lectionary passage this morning begins with him saying “Believe in God, believe also in me.” John 14:1 NRSV So there’s no other way to understand the famous saying of Jesus “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Right? The Christian faith is all about believing in Jesus, and that’s the only way to get right with God. Jesus said it. I believe it. That settles it.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 13, 2008

Scripture:

You know how so often in the Gospels Jesus’ disciples don’t get what he’s all about? How they misunderstand his teaching about the Kingdom of God? How they always want to be first, to have the seat of honor, when Jesus is telling them that even he is a servant not a master? It’s easy to put the disciples down and think we’re superior because we get Jesus, or think we do, in a way that, during his lifetime at least, they did not. Well, this morning we have another story in which the disciples don’t get what Jesus is talking about, only this time, I’m with them. I don’t get what he’s talking about either. The image of Jesus as “the gate” that John creates here just makes no sense to me. These words about sheep, gates, gatekeepers, shepherds, thieves, and bandits just don’t add up to anything for me. I can’t tell who John’s Jesus is talking about or what these various images are supposed to mean. I just don’t get it.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 6, 2008

Scripture:

Some Bible passages are just plain puzzling. There’s just no getting around it. They’re simply odd, or mysterious, or flat incomprehensible. Luke’s much loved story of Cleopas and the unnamed disciple encountering the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus has always been one of those puzzling stories for me; or at least it has a detail that is very puzzling, that has never made much sense to me. That puzzling detail is the vanishing of Christ. We just heard the story. Jesus, newly risen from the grave, joins two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Only they don’t recognize him. They think he’s some stranger, and a pretty dense one at that, one who has been in Jerusalem but hasn’t been paying attention. He doesn’t know about Jesus and how the authorities had crucified him. As they come near the village the stranger makes to go on even though it is getting dark, but the two disciples prevail on him to stay with them.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 23, 2008

Scripture:

Mary Magdalene was in the dark as she came to Jesus’ tomb that first Easter morning so long ago. We know that because John clearly tells us that she came “while it was still dark.” John 20:1 NRSV Maybe he means that it was physically dark, although it strikes me as unlikely that a woman alone would venture out in the dark in the land plagued by bandits and with only a primitive torch to light her way. Maybe it was really at dawn, as Matthew, for example, says. Either way, Mary was in the dark. Whether she was physically in the dark or not, she was certainly emotionally in the dark. Jesus, the one she had come to call Lord, whom she had followed from their home in Galilee to Jerusalem, that fascinating and fearful seat of Roman and Jewish power, the one to whom she had given her life, was dead. The Romans had crucified him, perhaps with the complicity and certainly with the approval of the Jewish temple authorities. She was crushed. How could it be? Jesus had been such a good man. He healed people. He taught them that God loved them. How could they kill him? But kill him they did. Mary was grieving hard and deep, and those of who have been in that place where demons dwell know how dark it is.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 20, 2008

Scripture:

Has it ever struck you as odd that the sacrament we celebrate tonight has so many different names? It has me. We call it “the Lord’s Supper,” presumably because it commemorates Jesus’ last meal on earth. We call it “the Eucharist,” which comes from Greek roots and means basically thanksgiving. In our own tradition, the most common name for it is “Communion,” and that may be the oddest and vaguest term of all. Communion? What in heaven’s name is that supposed to mean? The dictionary says the word means sharing, or possessing in common, or participation, among other things. Those definitions may help some, but not much. Those definitions don’t speak specifically to the religious meaning we’re looking for. So we need to look elsewhere to understand why we call the sacrament of bread and wine Communion, and I think we get a better idea of what we mean when we call the sacrament Communion from our reading this evening from Paul. So let’s take a closer look at that text and see what we can learn from it.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 16, 2008

Scripture:

No other faith makes as much of its founding figure’s death as Christianity. It is not an exaggeration to say that the death of Jesus as the heart of Christianity, to borrow a phrase from Marcus Borg. Just consider for a moment what the central symbol of Christianity is—a cross, one of the most diabolical and brutal instruments of torture and death that the sinful human mind has ever created. It is the thing the Romans used to torture and kill our founding figure, Jesus. On it he suffered. On it he died. And Christians of every variety throughout the world put it atop their churches, on their altars, and around their necks. We do too. On its fact it’s a very strange thing to do. It makes the judicial murder—that’s what capital punishment always is—of the one we call Lord and Savior central to the faith. It proclaims to the world that what this faith is primarily about is the death of its central figure Jesus.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 2, 2008

Scripture:

Pity the poor Pharisees in John’s story of Jesus and the man born blind. They had a real problem. They really believed that it was a sin to work on the Sabbath. Anyone who did was a sinner and was not right with God. Yet here was this man saying that he had been blind from birth and that this fellow Jesus had healed him—on the Sabbath. Jesus had done work on the Sabbath, and the man had been given his sight. Clearly only God could give sight to a man born blind, and God would never work through a sinner. Yet Jesus, a sinner, had given the man sight. It just didn’t make sense, but it sure looked like it was true. The truth was, Jesus had healed the man through what for the Pharisees was a sinful act. That was the truth, and it was a very inconvenient truth. It was a truth that challenged everything the Pharisees knew to be true. It was a truth that, if they let it, would shatter their whole worldview, and worse, their view of God and of God’s will for God’s people. The Pharisees of John’s story faced a very inconvenient truth indeed.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 24, 2007

Scripture:

Have you ever been thirsty? I mean really thirsty? So parched that you think you’ll die if you don’t get a drink? I doubt that many of us have been that thirsty. I don’t recall ever having been that thirsty myself. Still, we’ve all experienced thirst to some degree. It’s a natural part of life. Our bodies need water to function properly and even to survive. They tell us when the water level is getting low by producing the sensation of thirst. All life needs water, and we humans are no exception.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 17, 2008

Scripture:

We all know the phrase. Born again. We’ve all known people who describe themselves as “born again Christians.” We may even have known people who say that if you haven’t been “born again” you’re not really a Christian at all. The term comes from the Bible. Although the NRSV translation that I just read doesn’t use it, the term comes from the passage from the Gospel of John that we just heard. In the NRSV John 3:3 reads: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” (Emphasis added) The Greek word that the NRSV translates as “from above” can also mean “anew” or “again,” or so the scholars tell us. The phrase has passed into the Christian tradition and into our culture as born “again,” and it is this meaning of the term that I want to talk about this morning.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 10, 2008

Scripture:

In my favorite Broadway musical, My Fair Lady, the character Alfred P. Doolittle sings a song that I won’t inflict on you this morning but that has the lines: “With a little bit of luck, with a little bit of luck, when temptation comes you’ll give right in.” In its setting in the musical the song is great fun, but I think it also makes an important point. It says: Temptation is really tempting. Our two Scripture readings this morning are also about the temptation of temptation, odd as that phrase sounds. Our lessons say: Temptation really is tempting. It wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 3, 2008

Scripture:

We’ve all heard it: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” It’s a quote of Acts 16:31, and for some reason it’s usually recited in that archaic, King James language. Christianity’s most common message throughout most of its history has been: Believe on (or in) Jesus. That’s what’s required for salvation. That’s what God wants from us. Christians have proclaimed this message so loudly for so long that it has virtually drowned out any other message the faith might have, but here’s one really important thing about that message. It says that what is important is our relationship to who Jesus was, and is. It says nothing about what Jesus had to say. If believing in Jesus is what the faith is all about, then what he had to say really doesn’t matter. “Believe in him” here usually means believe that he is who the faith has always said he is, believe the right things about his identity. Believe that he is your personal Lord and Savior. And that’s about all. It really has nothing to do with anything he might have had to say.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 27, 2007

Scripture:

You’ve heard me say before what I’m about to say again. Today I’m preaching on a subject that is, for me, at the very core of my faith. I feel very passionately about it, so I hope I don’t come on too strong this morning. As always, you are free to disagree with me, and I suspect some of you will. That’s fine. We don’t have to agree on everything. That being said, however, I am convinced that my message this morning, which isn’t really my message at all but is the message of the Good News of Jesus Christ, is really important. That message is about nothing less than an understanding of the nature and function of faith and the nature and function of God. It is about what I am convinced is a widely held but ultimately faulty theology, a theology that, I believe, has destroyed the faith of more people than any other Christian belief. It is about a theology that, if I hadn’t by then developed a better understanding, at one time in my life would have destroyed mine. It is a theology that leads us to misunderstand the promises of scripture and the saving work of Jesus Christ. The message this morning is about the understanding that says that God protects the faithful and means by that assertion that God prevents bad things from happening to people of faith and their loved ones.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 20, 2008

Scripture:

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has written a book with the title The Audacity of Hope. Now, this sermon isn’t about Barack Obama. It certainly isn’t an endorsement of his or anyone else’s Presidential candidacy; and I haven’t even read the book. But I thought of that title when I read our passage from Isaiah this morning. Maybe you were struck as I was by the audacity of that passage. Think about it for a minute. The passage was written during the Babylonian exile of the Hebrew people in the 6th century BCE. It was written by a member of an exiled people, a people that had been defeated by a far more powerful neighbor and forced into exile in a foreign place, cut off from its land, its history, and its sacred places, severed from the roots that nourished it. The passage refers to this condition when it has “Israel say “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.” Isaiah 49:4 NRSV It was a situation that could easily have led to nothing but despair. All of the empirical evidence said we’ve lost. We were wrong. God was not on our side. We have no future. No one cares what happens to us. All is lost, all hope is gone.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 13, 2008

Scripture:

Do you ever get sick and tired of clichés? I know I sure do. They get trotted out when people don’t have anything original to say. They’re tired. They’re boring. They’re the refuge of the mentally lazy. There’s one that gets used in progressive Christian circles all the time. In seminary I got sick to death of it. It’s the cliché of faith as a journey. Whenever someone’s in a place in their faith life that we don’t particularly approve of we say: Well, faith’s a journey, which can end up just dismissing what may be some serious spiritual issues that we don’t want to or don’t know how to address. If faith is a journey we don’t have to worry about where we are or where anybody else is on that journey because, the implication is, we and they won’t stay there. Clichés can be a real barrier to spiritual discernment and to truly useful pastoral help.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 6, 2008

It’s Epiphany, that day in the church calendar when we commemorate the visit of the Magi, the Wise Men, to the newborn infant Jesus. So I recently reread Matthew’s story of that visit that we just heard; and when I did, something happened that often happens when I carefully reread one of the familiar Bible stories. I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. Something rather startling, in fact. It has do to with the star that guides the Magi to Jesus’ house in Bethlehem. We’ve all seen artistic depictions of that star that show it bright and prominent in the night sky. We even put huge representations of it on a downtown department store, the one Jane still insists on calling The Bon. People who insist on a natural explanation for Matthew’s literary device of the star talk of a comet, or a super nova, or an unusual alignment of planets, something that everyone would have seen.