RoboPreacher

i can learn to be easy The holy Gospel according to St. Luke the 3rd chapter ! Bypassing all the usual lackeys, the Word of God goes right up the line. Past the governor, and finally even over the head of the Emperor himself! In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius the word of God comes to not a single one of those men in power …   Neither , though, does the word of God come to the High Priest in the temple . Instead , the word of God comes to John .   John, the son of a priest. John, who apparently has nothing to do with the priesthood, though . John who’s doing ministry outside the temple, in the wilderness .   Yet, it is him , of all people, that the word of God comes! And the word of God comes to him, no less, while he’s out there in the wilderness .   Whatever else it is, the wilderness is the opposite of civilization . The wilderness is what lies on the other side of our tamed world. And it is there that the word of God comes every time. J...

i'm gonna set you free A sermon on Jesus' baptism : They say a little time on social media can cheer you up. Getting updates on old acquaintances. Checking in with friends. And if you’re Amanda, getting your daily-dose of dog pics; those are all things that can brighten you day… Like many things, though, too much of a good thing tends to have the opposite effect. At a certain point, instead of cheering you up, spending time on social media will start to bum you out. Until the whole thing goes upside-down; and you log off UNhappier than when you started! Now surely there’s plenty of reasons for this, but one must be our perennial tendency to measure ourselves against others.   After looking at yet another picture of some friends vacationing, your life starts to look a little shabbier . Scrolling through curated pic after curated pic of others living their best life, tends to cast a shadow over your own… It used to be that after high ...

upon our eyes Sermon on Jesus' Baptism; Luke 3:1-22 : There’s a book I haven’t read. A movie was made of it, though; and I have seen that. “Big Fish.” It’s basically a Father/Son story. The son, a consummate practicalist; and the father… The father who is, well, always telling these tall tales .  The son can’t stand it, and wishes for nothing more than his father to face up to reality.  It all comes to a head in the father’s last days. As his death comes, the son expects his father to finally give up the charade . The father, though , doesn’t . The father doesn’t, predictably, because of another one of his far-fetched stories… …When he was a boy, says the father, he and some buddies dared one another to run to the door of a dilapidated building on the edge of town. Rumor was, a witch lived there. And if you looked her in the eye, you’d see you own death… As the father tells it, he went to the door. And when the witch jumped out, he calmly asked her t...

the sky, the trees, houses, building, even my own body The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke the 3rd chapter ! Out there in the wilderness. The crowds who’ve gone to hear John. To be baptized by him. They want to know who he is. They’re not certain, but they’re filled with expectation… And why wouldn’t they be? After all, John is a great preacher. Even better than his preaching, however, is his message . He’s preaching deliverance : Liberation. Salvation. The crowds out there, they’re thinking. Perhaps John is the one . The long awaited messiah . The one to grant deliverance from imperial Rome’s occupation. They wonder who , exactly, is John. Could he be the messiah? Before anyone can ask; John looks around…  “You haven’t seen anything yet,” he bellows. “I baptize you with water, but there’s one who’s coming . He . Well he, will baptize you with Holy Spirit and fire. You may have never seen anything like me,” he blusters. “But the one who’s coming . ...

to tell you the truth, i ain't been sleeping too well The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark ! We all have riffs in our lives, places where tensions threaten to pull our lives apart, don’t we?  Despite our best attempts to mends those riffs, we haven’t been able to repair the breach. So, instead, we’ve made our compromises, we’ve done what we can to just try and get along, to not let the riff grow any bigger… We all know, though, we can’t hold the tear together forever… And ain’t it just like us, folks who have decided the best we can muster, is to hold the tear together for now to hear something truly remarkable; and reply with a distracted yawn, as if we had merely heard the weather report? We hear about Jesus’ baptism, and we only start thinking about the things that need to get done it we’re going to hold the breach together today. Despite our cold hearts, though, today’s Gospel is doing everything possible to get us to sit up and listen! We h...

after all the hell i've been through The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew the 3rd chapter! " I am a child of God ." How's that exercise going for you?   Before we talk more about how we're doing, I'd like to tell you a quick story... Many of you know I didn't grow up Lutheran. Now, as I wasn't a life-long Lutheran I wasn't baptized until later. I was still, however, a child when I was baptized. I feel like I have some memories of that day; considering I couldn't have been more than seven-years-old, though, it's unlikely... Now, the reason I wasn't baptized as an infant, but was still baptized young is because of my grandmother; bless her heart.   You see, when I was born, my folks weren't going to church much. And when Cody, my younger brother, was born my folks still weren't going to church much... Once there were two of us, though, my grandmother just couldn't take it anymore;...