RoboPreacher

i didn't need to when i wished you would A sermon on the 7th chapter of Ecclesiastes : Ecclesiastes, the book today’s passage comes from, is a hard -nosed pursuit of wisdom distilled down to its very essence . And after a few weeks with the Quester, we’ve got to hand it to the guy, he’s up to the task. Isn’t he?Ecclesiastes isn’t afraid of an unpleasant observation. It doesn’t blanch in the face of a disagreeable facts. And it’s not about shrink from making a difficult verdict, either. This book is willing to follow an argument all the way to its bitter end. But , in the end , here in today’s passage, what does the Quester discover for all his trouble? Does he come to one grand unifying theory of everything? Does he learn the great secret of it all ? Or, does he, at least , come to one single certainty he can hang his hat on? …No, he doesn’t ! Does he?!? On the contrary , at the end , the Quester doesn’t learn anything! Well, that’s not right, exactly. The Quester does lear...

questions are the answers you might need A sermon on the preacher's hymn to time's timelessness : In high school, my favorite band was Oasis . I’m sure you’ve heard them. In the 90s, they were basically inescapable . iTunes tells me their most popular songs are Wonderwall , Don’t Look Back in Anger , and Champaign Supernova . And that seems about right. Unless you were living under a rock , you must have heard at least one of those songs a time or two.   As for me , I’ve listened to those songs many a time! Like many people of a certain age, I have an overestimation of the music of my youth. And there’s a version of this sermon where I tell you all about Oasis, too! But suffice it to say, the thing that made Oasis so compelling is the very same thing that also made them so unstable !   Oasis was fronted by two working -class brothers . When they hit it big , they burnt through their money like a couple of teenagers who discovered a fortune —which is more or less exac...

not a lot, just forever A sermon on some initial conclusions of Qoheleth : I know what the Quester is talking about in today’s passage. I have dyslexia . Now, dyslexia is relatively common , so you may already know a thing or two about it. But once, when I was talking to friends, I said numbers, letters, and words don’t sit still in my head. They move around. I can’t just mentally keep track of them. Anyway, I’ve been told that’s not a bad description. Blessedly , though, I was diagnosed with dyslexia early . Of course, this was before IEPs. But my teachers were made to understand my situation. And many of them took time to help me learn the material, too. Nevertheless , school was mostly a humbling experience. There was no way standardized tests were going to go well for me. Most of the time, it just takes me longer to get my head around something. Given that, it was almost inevitable I would fall behind .   …But here’s the thing about dyslexia: once you learn someth...