RoboPreacher

tell me you love me anyway The conclusion of the Joseph family saga : Today’s passage is the very end of the lovely Joseph saga . I commend it to you, Genesis 37 through 50. I’d like to read the entire story, but we’d run out of time.   So this passage might land the punch it packs, though, I’d like to give you a general idea of this story’s overall shape. To do that, I’d like to lead you through a little exercise. This is borrowed straight from the author, Kurt Vonnegut. You can YouTube his “shape of story” lecture .   He does this thing where he charts stories on a simple graph. The horizontal axis has a “B” on the left end and an “E” on the right , for Beginning and End. The vertical axis has a “G” at the top and an “I” at the bottom , for Good fortune and Ill fortune.   Now, Vonnegut works through this exercise to illustrate how most stories have the same trajectory, and nearly always lie . They presume to know more about life than we actually do.   If yo...

this feeling inside A sermon from God's promise to Abraham in Genesis 15:1-6 : Well, what are we going to do with a God like this ?   This God who won’t be practical. This God who seems to think promises are more important than power . This God who won’t play by our rules. This God who, frankly, we’re not so sure what to do with… In fact, before this God is through with Abram , the poor guy will change his name, so different does he become! Apparently, Abram wouldn’t recognize the guy who comes out on the other side of it all. Abraham, a child of God who lives by faith , and faith alone . But the problem for folks like us is, many days we have more in common with Abram than we do with Abraham . In the scripture for today, Abram is doing the sort of thing we concern ourselves with; he’s filling out his life insurance policy. When he gets to the next of kin blank, he writes in the name, not of an heir, but a servant .   Before the ink can even dry, God interrupt...

i'm aware that you're cheatin' A sermon on the creation and fall of Adam and Eve : In these days of COVID, Amanda and I have taken no small amount of pleasure by dusting off old records and giving them another spin.   Lately, we’ve been playing Diana Ross’ album, “Diana,” nearly non-stop. As you may know, the first track on this excellent album is the outstanding single, Upside Down .   “Upside down / Boy, you turn me / Inside out / and round and round,” Diana sings. Celebrating that her world has been flipped on its head!   As Diana and Nile Rodgers swagger and strut their way through the song, it’s clear that although it may be disorienting to be turned upside down, inside out, and round and round. It’s the best kind of disorienting. Which I reckon you have your own hunch about. After all, isn’t that why you’re searching out the Word? If you’re anything like me , all week you’ve been trying to do everything in your power to keep a handle on your time. Schedulin...

& my life with change A sermon from Matthew 11:25-30 : Whether you have a Ph.D. in theology or not, you’re a theologian. We all are. One way or another, life itself will force you to try and answer questions like, “ where is God in all this” and “ what is God up to.”   Unfortunately , and maybe you’ve already noticed this, many of the answers that get tossed around ring pretty hollow . They ring hollow. …Way back in 1518, Luther addressed this. In fact, it was the ubiquity of all those empty , prepackaged answers that drove Luther to what we call the “reformation breakthrough.” The theology of the cross .   Because, and this is the thing, Luther wasn’t trying to do theology right . He was trying to find out if theology actually had anything to say about real -life. See, Luther’s problem was never that he was the smartest guy in the room. No, his problem was that all the peddled answers didn’t have a rotten thing to do with real -life—certainly not those places wh...