Review of “The Sacred Meal”
I recently discovered this opportunity through Thomas Nelson Publishing to receive a book in exchange for posting a review on my blog.  So while I’m not connected to Thomas Nelson in any other way and not required to post a positive review, I thought I should be clear that this isn’t just clear out of the blue.  For anyone who might be interested, here’s the link to sign up: http://brb.thomasnelson.com/ Eucharist, Communion, the Lord’s Supper. Different terms for the same event in worship. One that is full of strange language and often unfamiliar symbolism. Yet one that remains integ

Doubting Thomas Sermon
My most recent sermon from class on John 20:19-31.  I’ll put some other stuff about the passage up soon but I wanted to go ahead and post the sermon. This passage appears in the lectionary for the Sunday after Easter so that’s when I envisioned it. I would love to find a way to post audio or video of this one because the assignment was to preach it with notes, rather than a full manuscript.  A very interesting experience which I’ll talk about in the future.  It’ll be interesting to compare what I actually said because I know it wasn’t word for word what I wrote. I never really found a title I loved.  I also considered R

Hebrews Sermon – Writing a Better Story
Here is my sermon for class.  A couple things to note. This passage appeared in the Common Lectionary on World Communion Sunday, so I prepared it with a view towards preaching it on that Sunday. This sermon was written for Reconciliation United Methodist Church, my local church here in Durham, NC.  I didn’t preach it there but prepared it for that community.  The church strives to promote racial reconciliation in Durham and has embraced different styles of worship in order to foster that vision. Writing a Better Story I recently read a book by Donald Miller titled A Million Miles in a Thousand Yea

Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
This was the text for my first sermon assignment in my preaching class this semester.  I’ll put the passage after the jump, so you may want to go read it and then come back for my reflections.  I’ve included two translations, because the differences highlight an important Clearly the author of Hebrews thinks very highly of Christ.  The account of creation and the Son’s eternal nature follow the same pattern seen in the prologue to the Gospel of John, although it’s unlikely the two authors would have been familiar with one another. One of the trickiest parts of the passage is how to handle the psalm quoted in the middle.  Hebrews 2:6b-7

Children and Communion
The United Methodist church I attend in Durham has communion every week.  So it’s rare that the experience feels unique but yesterday was special to me.  The children usually leave for the bulk for the service but they always return for communion.  Throughout the liturgy I could hear the children but rather than being aggravated, I felt they added something to the service.  All the grown-ups were going through the responses very orderly and reverently (which I appreciated since I take the sacraments very seriously) but from the back of the sanctuary came all these sounds of life.  It reminded me of going over to a friend’s house for a party and discovering th