RoboPreacher

you're on my side again A sermon on Elijah & the widow; 1 Kings 17:1-16 : On any given Sunday you leave the bills on the counter, the to-do list undone , get the family in the car and head off to church.  On any given Sunday, with more prayer requests than you can keep straight and all the predictions of destruction the radio blared on your way in, the pastor climbs up in the pulpit and tells you something like, ‘Do not be afraid.’ Really? Don’t be afraid? Here you are, doing everything you can just to tread water, and the pastor tries to tell you something like ‘don’t be afraid.’ All you can think is, “how can he dare to say something like that to me ?” As scripture says, there’s nothing new under the sun. In 1 Kings 17, the great prophet Elijah begins his career. The Bible doesn't have a lot to say about him. Just that the word of the Lord came to him instead of anyone else, and told him to go and pick a fight with a king that was as wick...

for the same reason it's so hard to find   The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke the SeventhChapter! He sat there, shifting his weight to one side and then the other. It wasn't because of discomfort, though; he was anxious... Behind him, a room. In that room a beloved slave was dying. In front of him, the doorway. A little ways out the doorway, a procession of respected elders bringing Jesus; Jesus the prophet, the healer... He didn't feel worthy...   She sat there, shoulders tense, wondering if anyone was looking at her slip of paper. It wasn't that the question was complex, it was simple: How have you been blessed to bless others. The slip of paper sat on her lap, blank. She didn't think she had an answer that was worthy of writing down... They sat there together, eyes down. They sat there, fiddling with their hands, digging their feet into the ground. It wasn't that the request was too much, simply fetching someone. It wasn't t...

Luke 16-1-13: Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager,” and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.” Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, that that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me in their homes’. So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil’. He said to him, ‘Take you bill, sit down quickly, and make is fifty’. Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat’. He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty’. And his master commended the dishonest ma...