Program Sermon Outline (roughly followed) I. Back up a. Scripture as revelation 1. How does God intervene in writing Scripture? 2. How does God intervene in the world? b. Review series 1. Literal a) Plain reading b) Modern rationalist, truth-seeking tendencies 2. Allegorical 3. Moral 4. Anagogical II. What is allegory? a. Lisa is a fox b. Bernie Madoff is …
How to Read the Bible: The Allegorical
If you spend enough time on Internet message boards, you will see a lot of bad analogies. In the course of a discussion (pronounced “argument”) someone will try to make a point by referencing something that is presumably a point of common interest and common understanding between the two dialog partners (pronounced “combatants”), say, football. One might compare a political …
How to Read the Bible: The Literal (Program and Sermon)
Program Sermon Outline I. Classical a. Descriptive b. Just the facts “Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the …
How to Read the Bible: Introduction (Program and Sermon)
Program Sermon Outline (loosely followed) I. Questions a. How do you view the Bible? b. How do you use Bible? c. Do know the Bible? d. Do you want to know the Bible? II. Classical understanding a. Literal b. Allegorical c. Moral d. Anagogical III. Post-modern twist IV. Why read it? Why does it matter? a. Cultural defense 1. Literary …
What We Leave Behind (Program and Sermon)
Program Sermon We just went on vacation. We went to a place in the Hill Country, to a little plot of land that has been in Lisa’s family for almost a hundred years. The Hagy Camp sits on a bluff above the Western fork of the Frio River, about six miles north of Leakey, Texas. Lisa’s ancestors started going there …
Undone by Love: The Redoing (Program)
This is from a couple of weeks ago. (Still catching up from vacation and the beginning of school.) For this service, we broke up into small groups. A portion of our “Prayers of the People” from the series was read followed by a moment of silent reflection and then some discussion questions. At the end of the service, participants were …
Undone by Love: The Alien (Program and Sermon)
Program Scriptures An Immigrant’s Prayer by Remigio Hernandez Sermon I know we’re always looking for ways to annoy our fundamentalist friends and family, so here’s something: the exodus, the central narrative of the Jewish tradition and the paradigm for the Christian journey, didn’t really happen. It’s true. There’s a pretty substantial archaeological record from the period it would have happened, …
Undone by Love: The Earth (Program and Sermon)
Program Genny’s Introduction The journey of becoming an ecotheologian of sorts began for me through caring about people: I have a distinct memory from my first semester of coursework at Brite, where I was reading a text by Eleazar Fernandez where he asks the question: What does it mean to have hearts as large as the world? I was already …
John’s Church, Our Church: Oneness (Program and Sermon)
Program Sermon At the beginning of this series, I made an apology. Normally, we use the inclusive text for our Scripture readings, but I chose to use the NRSV for this series. The reasoning was that John is very careful about language and the inclusive text sometimes obscures it. The downside is that we hear God constantly referred to in …
John’s Church, Our Church: Friends (Program and Sermon)
Program Sermon Opening This week, Lisa and I celebrated our 19th anniversary. Over the years, people have occasionally asked me how a marriage lasts, why ours works. Sometimes people assume that there is some trick, like never going to bed angry or saying “I love you” at least once a day. That may be good advice that we follow more …