Sermon Archive for 2010

Audio recordings of sermons and services can be found here.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 25, 2010

Scripture:

Joseph is a righteous man, and Joseph has a problem. The woman to whom he is engaged but with who he has not yet had marital relations is pregnant. As Matthew introduces Joseph to us Joseph doesn’t know that Mary’s child is from the Holy Spirit, so he reaches the only conclusion he could possibly reach. Mary has been unfaithful. Joseph is a righteous man, and he knows what he must do. Joseph is a righteous man, and he knows what the law requires. He lives by the law. That’s what makes him righteous. That’s what being righteous means to him—obeying the law of Moses, the law of his Jewish people. Being righteous means being in right relationship with God, doing what God wants you to do; and Joseph knows that God wants him to obey the law, the Mosaic law, the law interpreted and enforced by the Jewish leaders and teachers of his day. That law says he must dismiss Mary, to use Matthew’s term. He must put her away and not go through with the marriage. She is an adulteress, as far as he knows; and the law said he could not marry her. So he planned not to. He planned to do the righteous thing as he and his Jewish faith of the time understood righteousness.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 24, 2010

Scripture:

Imagine poor Joseph. He’s engaged to Mary but not yet married to her. They have not lived together as husband and wife, but Mary is pregnant. What was poor Joseph to think? That Mary had been unfaithful, of course. There was no other possible explanation. So Joseph decides to do what the religious law, the religious authorities, and the cultural norms of his day all told him he had to do. He had to separate from Mary. Matthew’s account says “dismiss” her. It means break off the engagement and have nothing more to do with her. Joseph, Matthew tells us, was a “righteous” man, so he planned to do the righteous thing, the thing the law required. Yes, he was a decent man so he planned to do it quietly for Mary’s sake rather than make a big public scene out of it; but he knew he had to dismiss her, to dismiss her from his life.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 12, 2010

Scripture:

“Magnificat anima mea Dominum.” My soul magnifies the Lord. The Magnificat, so called because its first word in Latin is “magnificat,” is one of the most beautiful, powerful, and beloved passages in the Bible. It has been set to music countless times, usually in the Latin. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” that is, my soul greatly praises the Lord. Mary sings her praise to God because God has done great things for her. God has made her the mother of God’s Son Jesus. Through the angel God made Mary the offer to become the mother of Christ, and Mary said yes. She wasn’t coerced or compelled. She had a choice. God offered, and Mary said yes. God said in effect I need a partner in the great new thing I am about to do. I need a woman to bear my Son, and Mary said yes. She said yes, I’ll be your partner in the great new thing you are about to do. Together God and Mary brought God’s Son Jesus into the world, and Mary sings her praise to God. She praises God because God did not disdain her lowliness, her poverty, her humility, her meekness. Rather, God made her God’s partner. In the ancient language of the Christian tradition God made her the Theotokos, the Bearer of God. So Mary sings her praise to God.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 5, 2010

Scripture:

It’s Advent, that time in the church calendar that a lot of church people find really annoying. We want it to be Christmas already. Out in the world it already pretty much is, what with Wal-Mart and all the others using our sacred music to move merchandise, to get those cash registers ringing. So a lot of people want to come to church and sing Christmas carols; but the church says not so fast! We can’t just jump straight into Christmas. We’ve got to get ready first. So we’ve got these four Sundays of Advent to get through before we get to sing Christmas carols. So no Christmas carols! Not yet! We just aren’t ready.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 21, 2010

Scripture:

Well, it’s that time of year again. Next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent. I won’t be here next Sunday. I’ll be in Colorado visiting my brother. Maybe that’s why already this past week I started thinking Advent thoughts. Or maybe it’s because in the retail world that surrounds us it’s already Christmas. Whatever. We are about to enter that time of preparation for the birth of Jesus. That’s a pretty big deal with us. Jesus of course is what—or rather who—Christianity is all about. I recently heard a clergy colleague say that someone once complained that she talked about Jesus too much in church. Which is pretty funny when you think about it, seeing as how it really isn’t possible to talk too much about Jesus in a Christian church, not if it really is Christian. The reason I don’t think I could ever be Unitarian, or Jewish, or anything else but Christian isn’t because there is anything wrong with those other traditions. It’s because I’d miss Jesus. Jesus is central to my faith.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 14, 2010

Scripture:

Isn’t that passage we just heard from Isaiah beautiful? It is a vision of nothing less than a glorious new creation. The passage says that God is “about to create new heavens and a new earth.” It bids us be glad in what God is creating even now. Jerusalem, that city symbolic of God’s presence with the people, a city that when this passage was written was a miserable ruin, a faint shadow of its former glory, shall be a joy. There will be no weeping or distress there. Everyone will live a long and happy life. Everyone will have a home and food. God will be near to them and hear when they call. Even nature will be transformed. Best of all “they shall not hurt or destroy” on all God’s “holy mountain,” a symbol I think for the whole earth. What a joy it will be to live in that new world, a world of peace and prosperity for all people. The prophet here gives us a beautiful vision indeed.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 7, 2010

Scripture:

We all, or most of us, know about church stewardship campaigns. They happen in the fall, and they are always grounded in the notion that the church doesn’t have enough money because the people aren’t giving enough. The wisest speaker on stewardship that I ever heard, our former Conference Minister Hollis Bredeweg, says that these stewardship campaigns should really be called the fall anxiety drive. They tend to be grounded in anxiety, and they often seek to create anxiety in the people of the church so that they’ll cough up more money. Hollis says, and he’s absolutely right of course, that that’s no way for a church to operate. And he says: Have you ever seen an ad for Southwest Airlines that goes “ Fly our airline. We really need the money. Do you have any idea how much those airplanes cost, and what has happened to the price of jet fuel? Fly Southwest. We don’t want to go out of business!” That’s basically what most church stewardship campaigns, the fall anxiety drives, far too often come down to.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 31, 2010

Scripture:

I have a motorcycle. I sometimes even ride my motorcycle, although not as much as I used to. I sometimes think it is the one out of character thing I ever do. It’s good to do things out of character, to do the unexpected, from time to time. It keeps people from getting complacent, from thinking that they really know you when we can never truly know all there is to know about another person. There’s one thing that every motorcycle rider knows, or at least should know. Car and truck drivers don’t see you. They really don’t. You may have illegally loud pipes, and you may have your headlight on high beam; but they don’t see you, they don’t hear you, they don’t know you’re there. At the very least you have to assume that they don’t. Assuming that they do know you’re there is a very good way to get yourself killed.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 24, 2010

Scripture:

So today we have the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple, a tale with two characters. The first is a Pharisee praying to God, giving thanks that he is not like other people and boasting of his own piety, which, he is sure, is pleasing to God and justifies him in God’s sight. The other is a tax collector who can’t even look up to heaven but simply admits that he is a sinner and asks God for mercy. One of things that I always think is important to say about this parable is that we need to be very careful about identifying too quickly with the tax collector, the one of whom Jesus approves in the story. The story invites us to consider the ways in which we make ourselves superior to others and the ways in which we seek to justify ourselves before God through acts of piety, charity, and right belief. That’s important stuff, and I’ve preached on it before. It is not, however, what I want to talk about this morning.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 17, 2010

Scripture:

As most of you know, I used to be a lawyer. One of the classes you have to take in law school is an introduction to criminal law, even if you have no intention of ever practicing criminal law. The course that I took as a first year law student at the University of Oregon School of Law so many years ago now was taught by a professor we all knew to be a Fundamentalist Christian. He left Oregon after that year to teach at the Oral Roberts University School of Law. Enough said. In that first year criminal law class that I took from him he, very appropriately, was teaching us some of the basic assumptions and understandings that undergird the Anglo-American system of criminal law. One of those assumptions is that, as a general rule, each individual person bears responsibility for her or his own acts and does not bear responsibility for anyone else’s actions, except in a few exceptional cases. This professor talked about how that understanding of individual moral and legal responsibility developed historically. In doing so he quoted the passage we just heard from Jeremiah and quite correctly pointed to the Judeo-Christian tradition as the historical source of that understanding of individual responsibility. And all of the secular liberals at the University of Oregon School of Law—and that of course was almost everyone—went nuts. They ran to the Dean complaining that this professor was trying to force his religion onto them. He wasn’t of course. Everything he said in that class was perfectly appropriate, but never mind. Those secular liberals couldn’t stand the idea that any belief that they agreed with could have come from religion, never mind that the entire secular humanist ethic is grounded in Christianity, just with its religious foundation removed.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 10, 2010

Scripture:

Napoleon. The Shah of Iran. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. What do they all have in common? They all spent part of their lives as exiles. Napoleon was sent into exile as a punishment after he was deposed. The Shah of Iran fled into exile after he was deposed. Solzhenitsyn was forced into exile by a government that couldn’t tolerate his truth telling. Cases like these are probably what we think of when we think of exile.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 3, 2010

Scripture:

“Guard the good treasure entrusted to you!” “Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard from me!” Paul, or whoever wrote the letter we know as 2 Timothy, seems not to trust Timothy, who was a disciple of his in Ephesus in Asia Minor. He seems to be afraid that Timothy is going to change the “standard of sound teaching” that the author had given him. Paul was always afraid that people were going to come along after him and tell the people of the churches Paul had founded something different from what Paul had taught them. Whether Paul wrote this letter or not—he probably didn’t—this author expresses that same fear. Or maybe he’s just afraid that Timothy is becoming weak in the faith. He tells him to “rekindle the gift of God that is in you,” as though that gift were a fire that was dying out. Clearly our author is worried about Timothy’s commitment to the Gospel as the author had given it to him. He’s worried that it might get changed, and heaven knows we can’t have the Gospel changing on us, now can we.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 26, 2010

Scripture:

OK. so we’re all alive here, right? Everyone in this room right now is alive. God has created us as living beings. Life may be rather difficult to define biologically. I remember trying to do it in high school biology and having a terrible time with it; but then, I flunked high school biology so maybe that doesn’t prove much. Be that as it may, we all recognize life when we see it.. There are things that are alive—plants and animals—and things that aren’t—rocks, water, air. We’re alive, and we know what that means. We are animated beings not inanimate objects. Biologically speaking we are animals. We are alive, and we know what that means.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 19, 2010

Scripture:

Poor old Jeremiah. No one can ruin a party like Jeremiah. No one can bring you down like Jeremiah. If you’re feeling sort of blue or maybe even depressed, for heaven’s sake don’t read Jeremiah. He’ll make you feel worse not better. Jeremiah is called the gloomy prophet, and for good reason. With Jeremiah it’s all doom and gloom. Our passage from his book this morning begins “My joy is gone.” I didn’t know that Jeremiah ever had any joy to begin with, so I don’t quite see how it can be gone. Jeremiah isn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d want to go out and have a beer with. You’d be more likely to send him home to get back on his meds.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 12, 2010

Scripture:

I don’t know what it is, but sometimes Bible passages just remind me of the lyrics of popular songs. Maybe it’s because so much of the Bible is about love, and so many popular songs are about love. A different kind of love perhaps, but still love. This time it was Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep that reminded me of the great Vernon Duke song “Taking a Chance on Love.” Now, I recognize that the connection between the standard love song “Taking a Chance on Love” and an ancient parable about sheep may not be obvious to anyone but me, so let me try to explain what may seem to you to be a strange association.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 5, 2010

Scripture:

So. It’s Communion Sunday again. Every month, on the first Sunday of the month, and occasionally at other times, we celebrate this sacrament of the Christian faith. Many, probably most, of us have been partaking of the elements of Communion all our lives. Yet whether you come to the table today for a time past counting or whether the holy sacrament is a newer experience for you, surely we all know that the sacrament of Communion, technically called the Eucharist, is a rite distinctive to Christianity. Partaking of Communion is a distinctly Christian act, indeed, together with the sacrament of baptism, it is the distinctly Christian act.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 29, 2010

Scripture:

My daughter Mary has a friend, a fellow I have known since Mary was in high school. I don’t see him often, but I did see him at my grandson Maddox’s birthday party last Sunday. Every time I see him he wants to argue theology with me. Like I can’t go to my grandson’s birthday party without having to work?! And it is rather strange that my daughter’s friend always wants to argue theology with me. You see, he claims to be an atheist. He can be a very assertive atheist. Yet every time I see him he’ll start a conversation by asking me some theological question.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
Written for August 22, 2010, but not given

Scripture:

So this morning we have the prophet’s call story from Jeremiah. Most of the prophets have a call story, and Jeremiah’s is pretty typical. Its typical elements include a call from the LORD, a protestation from the prophet that he can’t do what the LORD is calling him to do, the LORD’s refusal to accept the protestation, and the LORD’s commitment to be with the prophet as he carries out his divine commission. The prophet Isaiah, for example, has a very similar call story in Isaiah 6. Generally speaking I really like these prophets’ call stories. The University Congregational UCC choir sang a setting of Isaiah’s call story at my ordination. These stories express in poetic form call experiences not unlike my own, and not unlike those of many of my pastoral colleagues.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 22, 2010

Scripture:

At the lectionary study I do on Wednesdays at Merrill Gardens this week, as we read the passage from Luke we just heard, and as I read to them the passage from Isaiah that we also just heard, the women who come to that study told stories of the Sabbath practices of their youth so many years ago. They would get dressed up. One woman said her father almost never went to church, but he got dressed up for Sunday, even when he had to go out and milk the cows. The kids were not allowed to run and jump around like kids normally do when the family would gather for Sunday dinner. And they were absolutely forbidden to have a deck of cards on that day. A woman from Germany told of how quiet it was in Germany on Sunday, as all the stores were closed and the big trucks didn’t drive through the town. I shared my memory of how all the stores—or most of them in any event—in Eugene were closed on Sunday and how we always got dressed up for church. It was the only reason I had a suit and tie—a clip on tie, but still a tie—when I was a kid. Many of you, at least those of you of my generation or older, probably have your own Sabbath memories from childhood. Sabbath, which Christians have long marked on Sunday, used to be kind of a big thing even in secular America.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 15, 2010

Scripture:

There’s an issue I want to talk to you about this morning. It’s a really important issue in the life of the universal Christian church. It came up for me this past week not in anything that happened here in our church. The issue I want to talk about is a bigger problem in the wider church than it is here, but it’s something we all need to pay attention to. The issue came up when I read an op-ed piece by a UCC pastor named G. Jeffrey MacDonald. In that piece he raises the question of creeping consumerism in the churches. He tells of how a few years ago a group in his small congregation in New England directed him to keep his sermons to ten minutes, tell funny stories, and leave the people feeling great about themselves. He heard in that direction the implication that if he didn’t give the people the “amusing fare” they wanted they would get their pastoral leadership somewhere else. MacDonald’s piece raises important questions about the nature of worship in general and of preaching in particular that are worth taking a look at.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 8, 2010

Scripture:

When you spend as much time immersed in the Christian faith as I do, what with me being a professional Christian and all, there are certain issues that keep cropping up. Sometimes when they do you groan. Not you again! But the reason they keep cropping up over and over again is because they are vitally important to the life of faith, but they don’t have easy, clear cut, indisputable answers. Science is the realm of certainty—or at least that’s how science is popularly understood. It gives clear answers. It’s answers may change over time, but until they have been displaced by better answers scientific answers are quite certain. Not so with theological answers. Theology, which is thinking about God and about the faith, is not the realm of certainty. It is the realm of wonder, of struggle, of doing the best we can while knowing that our ultimate questions ultimately have no ultimate answers, at least no ultimate answers that are accessible to us mortals here on earth.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 25, 2010

Scripture:

I have to admit that I have always had a lot of trouble with prayer, and I still do. I don’t know if any of you have problems with prayer like I do, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you do. Our passage from Luke this morning got me thinking anew about prayer and about why I had such an immediately negative reaction to that passage. I’m not sure I have an answer to that question yet, but this morning I want to use Luke’s stories about prayer that we just heard to do some reflecting on prayer and on why I have so much trouble with it. I hope that my doing so may give you some help in understanding prayer and in wrestling with whatever difficulties with it you may have yourself—and maybe even give me some help too.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 18, 2010

Scripture:

I just love the prophet Amos. That’s why I switched the usual order of our scripture readings, so I could read Amos. He’s one of the great writing Hebrew prophets of the eighth century BCE. That’s so long ago that you’d think he wouldn’t have anything to say to us, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Amos thunders against economic injustice more powerfully than anyone in the Bible before Jesus himself. Maybe even more powerfully than Jesus himself. Amos is the one who roars “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Amos 5:25 He lets the rich oppressors of the ordinary people and of the poor in his society have it like no one else. He is the prophet of justice par excellence. I just love Amos.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 11, 2010

Scripture:

We all love the Parable of the Good Samaritan, right? It was one of the first Bible stories I remember hearing as a child, I suppose because we so love to teach it to our children. We tell them that it means you should care for others and not pass them by on the other side of the road. And of course it does mean that. It also means that God wants us to put caring for those in need ahead of our own spiritual concerns, especially our concern for our own religious purity. That’s the significance of the people who pass the beaten man by on the other side of the road being not ordinary Jewish people but a priest and a Levite, officials of the temple in Jerusalem and guardians of the Purity Code that is part of the Mosaic Law in the Hebrew Bible. These are powerful and true lessons. Jesus makes his points here, as he always did, not with a lengthy discourse on moral theory but in a short, pithy story, in a parable.. This parable begins with Luke’s version of the Great Commandment, when the lawyer who sets up the parable quotes Jewish scripture as saying “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself,” and Jesus approves of his doing so. The parable then gives a powerful illustration of what love of neighbor means. It’s a great story, one of my favorites, and perhaps one of yours too.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 4, 2010

Scripture:

It is, I think a nice coincidence that the lectionary gives us the story of Naaman and Elisha on this American Independence Day. That story is a perfect vehicle to help us American Christians do something really important. It helps us ponder some fundamental questions about our nation and our citizenship in the most militarily powerful country in the world. That’s what I want to do this morning. And before I do I want to say that this is a very personal sermon for me. I feel passionately about some of the things I’m about to say. I don’t expect all of you to agree with me, but I do ask you to hear what I have to say and to consider it carefully before rejecting it, if you do reject it. That being said, let’s start by reviewing that story of Naaman and Elisha that we just heard from 2 Kings.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 27, 2010

Scripture:

This week the lectionary gives us a passage from Luke that I really don’t like. When I read in that passage Jesus telling a man who wanted to go bury his father before coming to follow Jesus “Let the dead bury their own dead” and then refusing to let another go say good-bye to his family before joining Jesus, I thought: But that is so un-pastoral! That doesn’t sound like Jesus to me! Those good folks weren’t asking anything unreasonable! They had legitimate concerns that Jesus should have acknowledged and helped them to deal with! Yuck! Luke just got this one wrong! That can’t be Jesus talking! Perhaps some of you had a similar reaction.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 20, 2010

Scripture:

As some of you know, I serve on the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. One of the many responsibilities of that committee is overseeing the process by which people gain approval for ordination in the UCC. The first time that the committee becomes involved with a person who believes that she has a call to ordained ministry is when that person applies to the Committee to be granted the official status of a person engaged in the ordination process. And one of my objections to the process as it is currently constituted is what we now call that official status. We used to call it “in care.” A person pursuing ordination was taken “in care.” Back when I was in seminary I was “in care” of this Conference. But a few years ago the UCC at the national level changed the terminology for this status from “in care” to “Member in Discernment.” They were going to call is “Person in Discernment”—PiD—but someone pointed out that in the medical world PID means pelvic inflammatory disease, so they changed it to Member in Discernment.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 13, 2010

Scripture:

We are Protestant Christians, right? And the issue that more than any other originally distinguished Protestant Christianity from Roman Catholic Christianity, and to some extent still does, was the Protestant conviction that we are justified, or saved, by grace through faith rather than by our doing the works of the law, rather, that is, than by how we live. The Protestant confession that we are saved by grace through faith often gets contracted to we are saved by faith. Either way, the concept “faith” is central to Protestant Christianity. So to understand this central distinguishing confession of our type of Christianity, we have to understand what “faith” means. And the sad truth is that that central word is often badly misunderstood today. It is usually taken to mean believing in certain propositions about Jesus, and it simply doesn’t mean that. So this morning I want to talk about what faith means when we say that we are justified or saved by faith.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 6, 2010

Scripture:

The Bible is full of stories about people who did acts requiring great courage. Peter, James, John and the others abandoning their families and their livelihoods to follow Jesus. Paul beginning to proclaim the faith he once persecuted. And of course Jesus, proclaiming a message and living a life that were very likely to get him killed but doing it anyway, even when it became clear that they would indeed get him killed. Faith, it seems, is not for the faint of heart. Courage, it seems, is a requirement of the life of faith. We have another of those stories of immense courage this morning in our reading from the Elijah cycle in 1 Kings.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 30, 2010

Scripture:

We are members of the UCC, right? And we all know that UCC stands for Unitarians Considering Christ, right? That’s an old dig at our denomination, calling us Unitarians Considering Christ. We laugh at it, but I have to tell you that I’m afraid there’s a lot of truth in it. In my work on the Conference’s Committee on Ministry, for example, I’ve talked and listened to several people who are preparing for ordained ministry in the UCC, or who are even before the Committee for their ordination interview, who really do seem to be Unitarians. Yet the fact remains that, historically speaking, the Congregationalists aren’t Unitarians, Unitarians are Congregationalist heretics. I used to love saying that to my Unitarian classmates at Seattle U. Way back in about the eighteenth century some Congregationalists, strongly affected by the rationalism of the European Enlightenment that was in full swing at the time, decided that they did not believe the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, That doctrine says that God is both Three and One. God is Three in One. God is One and God is Three. That’s not very rational—more about that shortly—and so some Congregationalists rejected it and adopted a Unitarian view of God. The Unitarian view of God says that God is just one and not both three and one. And those folks split off from the Congregationalist churches, which remained Trinitarian in their view of God.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 23, 2010, Pentecost Sunday

Scripture:

The story of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples at Pentecost that we just heard from Acts is, I suspect, rather familiar to most of us. We hear it every year on Pentecost Sunday. I has vivid and striking images—a sound like the rush of a violent wind and tongues as of fire. It has what I think is one of the funniest lines in the Bible. When the disciples start babbling on in all sorts of languages—more about that shortly—Peter tells the crowd “these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.” I always hear him saying “Give us time. We’ll get drunk later,” although I suppose that wasn’t the inference that the author intended. I almost know this passage by heart, so familiar is it to me, and perhaps to you. It’s easy for familiar passages like this to become trite, or to become so familiar that we glide over the surface of them, seeing in them what we’ve always seen in them, seeing nothing new.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 16, 2010

Scripture:

We’ve all heard it. “Jesus is coming!” “The end is near!” As I heard someone put it once: “Jesus is coming, and boy is he angry.” Only the way I heard it didn’t use the word angry; but it might be offensive to some if I used the real word up here, so I cleaned it up. Or as I heard someone else put it: “Jesus is coming. Look busy.” Christians have been talking about the second coming of Jesus ever since the first coming of Jesus. The New Testament is full of verses about a second coming of Jesus. They’re in the Gospels. They’re in the Epistles. And they’re in Revelation. Christians seem to have had a sense from the very beginning that Jesus was going to return. And that his second coming wouldn’t be anything like his first coming. The classical Christian understanding of the second coming is that this time Jesus would come in power and glory to defeat the powers of evil, put an end to history as we know it, and establish the Kingdom of God on earth, through force if necessary.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 9, 2010

Scripture:

We just met a woman named Lydia in our reading from Acts. She’s a woman of the ancient world. She lived a long, long time ago in a place far away in a culture very different from ours. Acts gives us only a few lines telling us about her, but we actually learn a good deal about her in these few lines. She was a Greek. She came from a Greek city with a difficult name in Asia Minor. When we meet her she is living in Philippi. Philippi was a city in northeastern Greece, and it was a Roman colony. Lydia lived among both her own people the Greeks and among the Romans, the almighty rulers of the entire known world at that time. She was a businesswoman. She dealt in purple cloth. The color purple was reserved for the elite, the wealthy and the powerful in her world. Her customers were wealthy and influential. She was successful. We know that because she owned her own house, something only the wealthy could do. She was a person of worth and substance in her world, someone the world would have taken quite seriously.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 9, 2010

Scripture:

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 2, 2010

Scripture:

It probably won’t come as a surprise to you that I have a problem with the Book of Revelation. I suspect we all do, especially with the way it gets misused to be a prediction of a violent future when it is really about the present reality of the early Christians in the distant past. This morning, however, I have a different problem with it, and especially a problem with the passage we just heard. That passage contains the line “the sea was no more.” I mean, what’s up with that? I used to be a boater, frequently cruising the inland waters of Puget Sound and the Canadian islands. I love boating. It’s the one thing I miss from the days when I used to make good money as a lawyer. And I’ve loved going to the beach my whole life, as I know many of you do. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of our frequent trips from Eugene over to the magnificent Oregon coast. With no sea there’s no coast, no beach, no bays and harbors. So what’s up with “the sea was no more”? This passage makes it sound like that’s a good thing, but it sure doesn’t sound like a good thing to me. With no sea where’d we get our fresh salmon and halibut? So my first reaction to this line is “well, you can forget that!”

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 25, 2010

Scripture:

OK. So we just heard two Bible stories about someone bringing a dead person back to life. Did you notice how similar those two stories are? We’ll get to that in a minute. It’s important. But if you’re like me, and in this respect at least I suspect that you are, the first thing you probably noticed was that in these two stories Peter and Jesus bring dead people back to life. And if you’re like me, and in this respect I suspect that you are, you probably thought: “No way! That just doesn’t happen. No one can bring a dead person back to life.” Frankly, if being a Christian means that I have to believe these stories literally, factually, then I can’t be a Christian. I don’t believe them literally, factually. If you do, fine; but I can’t, and I don’t. For me the literal meaning of these stories is a major barrier to faith.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 18, 2010

Scripture:

It’s a familiar story to many of us. Saul, later known as Paul, is persecuting the early followers of Jesus in Jerusalem in the name of Jewish orthodoxy. Then he gets authority from the chief priests to go to Damascus and do the same thing there. That’s when it happens. He sees a bright light, is knocked off his feet, struck blind, hears the voice of Jesus, and is converted to faith in Jesus Christ. Thereafter he becomes the Apostle to the gentiles, and the rest is history.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 11, 2010

Scripture:

Thomas doesn’t want to believe it. His friends, people with whom he has been together for something like three years, people who like him have given up everything in their former lives—family, friends, work—to follow Jesus, people we’d expect him to trust tell him “We have seen the Lord.” And he doesn’t want to believe it. I get that, and maybe you do too. I can pretty easily put myself in Thomas’ place, and not only because my name is his and I too am a twin. I can easily imagine myself saying: “Yeah. Right. You’ve seen the Lord. What kind of a fool do you take me for? He’s dead. We all know that. They crucified him. End of story. So stop kidding me. This isn’t funny. Seen the Lord? I don’t think so.” His friends have told him the truth, but Thomas is resisting. He doesn’t want to believe it.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 4, 2010

Scripture:

It was the women first. In all four Gospels it was the women who saw him first. In all four Gospels Mary Magdalene saw him, sometimes by herself as in the passage from John that we just heard, sometimes with other women. But it was always the women who saw him first. That’s a striking fact about these Resurrection stories. The Gospels, all but Luke anyway, were written by and for Jews. All of them were written in a world where the dominant culture was Greek. Neither the Jewish culture of that day nor the Greek one had much time for women. They were strongly patriarchal cultures. Men ruled, women obeyed. Men were the human norm. Women were somehow less than that, sort of defective humans. Ancient sexism really was that bad. Men spoke with authority in the community. Women hardly spoke at all. People listened to men. No one listened to women outside the home. Yet the risen Christ appeared first to women. He made women the first Apostles when he sent them to tell the others of his resurrection. He appeared to the men and made them apostles too, but that was later. First it was the women.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 1, 2010

We’ve done something new for us this evening. On this Maundy Thursday, unlike other Maundy Thursdays in this church, we have gathered for a common meal. We have not only prayed and sung together, we have eaten together. We often commemorate the Last Supper with a symbolic meal, and we will do that again in a few moments. But when Jesus and his closest friends gathered on that fateful evening so long ago they didn’t have a tiny cube of bread and a sip of wine. They had a meal. A real meal.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 28, 2010

Scripture:

There’s something about Christianity that puzzles and troubles me. It really is all the fault of the Roman emperor Constantine back in the fourth century CE. What puzzles and troubles me is how Christianity has domesticated Jesus. How we have domesticated Jesus is Constantine’s fault because he made Christianity the official religion of the empire all those centuries ago. Before Constantine Christianity was first a Jewish sect that the empire more or less tolerated, then an illegal religion that the empire more or less persecuted. The Christian tradition has long since lost sight of the fact that it was easier for Christianity to be true to Jesus Christ before it became the established religion of the Roman Empire that it was after Constantine legalized it and then established it as the official imperial faith. After Constantine Christianity became an institution that functioned as much as anything else to support and legitimize the imperial government and its policies. The interests of the church were seen as the same as or even subordinate to the interests of empire. And that’s a really puzzling development when you put aside the picture of Jesus that you probably have had all your life and look at who Jesus really was and how he really related to the institutions of the state and the church. He related to the institutions of the state and the church of his time in a way that is the opposite of establishment. With regard to the church and the state of his day, Jesus was nothing less than subversive.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 21, 2010

Scripture:

OK, so we all need to do something. Right now. As fast as we can. We all need to stand up, walk out of this church, and never come back. Why? Because Glenn Beck, Fox News commentator and the pride (?!) of Mount Vernon, says we have to. He recently said that if your church preaches social and economic justice you must leave it. The term social and economic justice, he informed us, is code for Communism and Nazism. Communism and Nazism aren’t the same thing, but we’ll let that gaff slide for now. They’re both very bad things of course. Our problem is that the UCC is the social and economic justice church par excellence. Social and economic justice is a huge part of what the UCC is all about. Glenn Beck is of course a noted expert on all matters religious. I mean, he must be. He’s got a national TV show, so he must be an expert on whatever he talks about, right? He says we have to leave our church because it preaches social and economic justice. Which makes us Communists—or Nazis—or both, although how you can be Communist and a Nazi at the same time continues to escape me. But then, I’ve only got a Ph.D. in Russian history and not a TV show on Fox News, so I guess I have to yield to Mr. Beck’s superior knowledge. So—out you go! And I’m right behind you! I’ll turn off the lights and lock the door behind me, so don’t worry about that.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 14, 2010

Scripture:

Okay. We get it. We get what our readings from 2 Corinthians and Luke are trying to tell us this morning. In Jesus Christ God reconciles the world to Godself and doesn’t count the world’s transgressions against it. God reconciles us to God and doesn’t count our transgressions against us. God rejoices at the return of the Prodigal, the return of the sinner who repents and returns to God. We know this God. This is the God of grace, mercy, and forgiveness that we believe in, that we’ve heard an awful lot about. God forgives. Yeah. We know. As the German poet Heinrich Heine said when asked on his deathbed if he though God would forgive him, “God will forgive me. That’s His business.” God’s in the forgiving business. We get that.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 7, 2010

Scripture:

If you’re like me and like most people of faith—and in this regard anyway I suspect that you are—you probably think that you know a thing or two about God. God is love, right? It says so in the Bible. God is all about grace, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, right? We learn that about God from Jesus. We know all that about God, don’t we?

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 21, 2010

Scripture:

Every time I read or hear the account from Luke that we just heard of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness I’m shocked. I’m shocked to hear, of all things, the devil quoting scripture! How can the devil quote scripture? Isn’t scripture supposed to show us to path to salvation, to show us God’s way? How can the devil use God’s way? My first reaction always is that this just doesn’t make sense. But there it is. The devil quoting scripture. Can we make any sense out of that at all? It’s there, so I guess we have to try.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 17, 2010

Scripture:

I was powerfully struck by something I heard one of my UCC clergy colleagues say recently. This isn’t to pick on him. He’s a great guy and a good pastor, but this one thing he said kind of struck me wrong. Along with another colleague he and I were discussing the upcoming season of Lent when he asked: How can we make Lent more fun? I didn’t call him on it, and I won’t; but the thought that flashed through my mind was: Fun? Lent’s not supposed to be fun! But I get where he’s coming from. People, including church people, like fun. It’s easy for us clergy types to think that we’ll be more successful if we make church nothing but fun and games, to make it entertainment, so that more people will want to come. But here’s the thing. Religion isn’t entertainment. It’s a whole lot more serious than that. That’s not to say we can never have fun at church. I believe, and I hope, that we do. But God’s not an entertainer, and life has a whole lot more in it than just fun. Since religion is about God, and since religion is about human life—all of human life—lived in relationship with God, it too has to be about more than entertainment and fun.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 14, 2010

Scripture:

Have you noticed that I’m kind of playing a trick on you in this service this morning? It’s not technically liturgically proper, but I’m smushing together two different liturgical days that don’t usually go together—the Baptism of Christ and Christ’s Transfiguration. Today is Transfiguration Sunday in the liturgical calendar, so that part of this morning’s service is OK. It’s the Baptism of Christ part that is odd. Baptism of Christ comes in January, and I was away on that Sunday this year; so I missed doing something on that Sunday that I find quite meaningful and that I’ve been doing here for the past few years. I missed doing the renewal of baptismal vows ceremony where I spray water on all of you. I like spraying water on all of you, both because it’s fun and because I think the symbolism of it is so powerful. So I decided to do it today as part of our preparation for our congregational annual meeting this afternoon after worship. It is good, I think, as we gather to do the work of the church, to remind ourselves that we are baptized in the name of the Triune God, whose work we seek to do.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 7, 2010

Scripture:

Have you ever gotten a call? A phone call, for example? The phone rings. You don’t know who it is; or, even if you do because you’ve got caller ID you don’t know what the person wants or what the call portends. So you answer, and you listen to learn who’s calling or what they are calling about. Maybe it’s someone trying to sell you something or hitting you up for money; and maybe, like me, at that point you sometimes just hang up. But maybe it’s something important; so you listen, you respond, and maybe that phone call changes your life. I’ve certainly gotten phone calls that have changed mine. We’ve all gotten phone calls.

Blake Kent
January 24, 2010

Scripture:

Ever since my first trip overseas when I was 16 I knew I wanted to live for a time in another country. Growing up in the church and attending a Christian liberal arts college I had a number of opportunities to travel and serve overseas—Guatemala, Kenya, Indonesia, China—and each time I left home for a new culture and a new adventure I was impacted by a lot things, but one of the things that most amazed me was how God could take a little group of inexperienced students and somehow use them as a community in witness of his life and his Kingdom.

Manny Odom
January 17, 2010

What is a miracle? This sermon is about hospitality as the story from John's gospel is, we know all the characters.The hungry multitude , the nervous diciples and the doubting. The good hearted lilttle boy with five barley loaves and two fishes and Jesus who makes it all happen.There is little here to surprise us. We know how the story ends and as we hear it once again we ask ourselves the question"is it true?" In some sense depending upon the way we are prepared to receive it,we will either hear or not hear what the story has to say. The story as truth or "is it true?" is the wrong question to put. Miracles are not arguements or propositions to which there are yes or no answers. The question to be put about a miracle are not "is it true?" or "how can this be?" but rather what does it say. At its core a miracle is a message, an illustration or demonstration of a message that God chose to communicate to us.A miracle is God's message extraordinaire in the midst of the ordinary. It is not an exercise in the supernatural or in the irregular but a communication. To understand a miracle is to understand something of God. , to see a miracle is to see something of God.The ancient people of the bible may not have known what a miracle is but at least in a rational or intellectual sense they "knew one as they sees it" . At the birth of Jesus, angels descended over the Bethlehem plain bringing good news of the child's birth; the shepherds tending their sheep after being assured that there was nothing to fear gathered their sheep and followed the star to the place where the bambino lay. There was not enough time to debate the existance or non existance of angels. They went,fell down at the manger and worshipped.

Marci Weis
January 10, 2010

It was about two years ago that I sat in that small room behind you all, telling Pastor Tom that I thought that I was perhaps going a bit crazy. I told him that I was coming to the realization that I felt a call to go to seminary and pursue ministry. I told him that this was perhaps the most inconvenient call that I could imagine and had no basis in logic or sanity. He answered me with two points. First he reassured me that if I didn't question my sanity a bit, he would be nervous. Second, he told me that this would be a journey that would involve our entire congregation. As with most bits of wisdom that Pastor Tom passes on, I found that I took in only a small bit (though the rest stayed with me in some dark recess of my mind). I nodded my head politely when he told me that my going into seminary was a journey for our whole congregation though I had neither any sense of what he was talking about nor quite frankly any interest in what he was saying....this to me was a personal journey and not a journey of a faith community, regardless of how important this particular faith community is in my life. Let me pause here and say simply that this particular faith community is incredibly beloved to me and honored by me. Who each of you are as members of this community has been and is an incredible blessing in both my own life and the life of my family. That being said, I simply did not see what Pastor Tom meant when he said to me that you all were a part of this journey.

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 3, 2010

Scripture:

Most of us know that there are two Christmas stories in the New Testament. There’s the one in Matthew. We just heard part of it. It’s the story of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem and the visitation of the magi guided by a star. Then there’s the one in Luke. That’s the one we really love, the one with Jesus laid in a manger and visited by shepherds to whom angels had appeared and spoken of this birth and its significance. There’s no story of Jesus’ birth in Mark, John, or anywhere else in the New Testament, just these two from Matthew and Luke.