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Showing posts from October, 2017

Sermon, "Theology at the Theatre: Les Misérables," Romans 5:1-11

Sermon 10/29/17 Romans 5:1-11 Theology at the Theatre: Les Mis érables             How many Harry Potter fans do we have out there? You might be saying to yourself, “I thought we were talking about musicals, about Les Miserables today!” and we are. I promise I’ll get there…in a minute. I love the Harry Potters series. My childhood pastor actually got me hooked on them – he was reading and enjoying them, so I gave them a try. Some of you know that I even have a Harry Potter closet under the stairs, like Harry sleeps in in the first book, set up in my parsonage. I claim this is for my niece and nephew to enjoy, but it’s at least 50% for me! Anyway, through the years, author J.K. Rowling has continued to expand and explore the world of Harry Potter that she has so masterfully created, and she is pretty free with her comments about the series and characters. The villain of Harry Potter is the evil Lord Voldemort, and people pretty universally think he’s awful. But Harry also ha

Sermon, "Back to (Bible) School: Prophecy," Ezekiel 37:1-14

Sermon 10/1/17 Ezekiel 37:1-14 Back to (Bible) School: Prophecy             This week is the last week in our series studying the kinds of literature we find in the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. We’ve looked at the Law, the history books of the Bible, and poetry or wisdom literature in the Bible. And today, we turn our attention to large chunk of the Hebrew Scriptures that make up the writings of the prophets. I think prophecy as a biblical genre is probably the most misunderstood, because we use the word prophecy to mean many different things.             What first comes to mind when you hear the word “prophecy”? Often, people think immediately of predicting the future, a kind of fortune-telling. We seem to have a fascination with anything that suggests we could accurately predict the future. I saw some posts going around on facebook in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, I think, linking the dates of the storm and certain verses from the gospel of