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 …

How to Read the Bible: Introduction

Growing up in a Southern Baptist church, the Bible was at the center of most of what we did.  We were Protestants, which meant that we believed in the power of the Bible alone to guide our lives.  And, because we were Baptists, we might yell at you if you disagreed.  Looking back, I often think we worshipped the Bible …

Return (Program and Sermon)

Program Sermon In 587 BCE, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar.  The temple was destroyed and most of the residents were taken into exile.  In 538, the Persian ruler, Cyrus, defeated the Babylonians and encouraged people to return to their homes.  While many Jews remained in diaspora, preferring to keep the lives they had built in exile, some …

Return (and a Letter from the Board)

Whenever we return to someplace we’ve been before, memories bubble up like a spring.  My memories tend to be visual.  When I think of Kidd Springs, I think of the light.  Three walls are glass looking out over the pond.  The light filters in through the trees and bounces off the water in the pond.  Life wanders by outside and …

Packing (Program and Sermon)

Program Sermon Living on the Gulf Coast, you become deaf to the warnings.  Threats constantly loom in the Gulf from June and November.  When I first moved there, I obsessively checked weather sites, monitoring, projecting, guessing, hoping.  Most of the time, storms go elsewhere; there’s a lot of coast to destroy.  Even when they look like they might head your …

Packing

There was a period in my life, during college and dropping out of college and returning to college, that I moved fourteen times in seven years.  After Lisa and I were married, we slowed that pace to moving only once every couple of years.  Sometimes, the move was only across town and sometimes it was across the country. Either way, …

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 …

A Little Bit of Death, but So Much Life

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.  There’s this naked lady living in a garden with her boyfriend, also naked.  A talking snake tells her to eat an apple, so she does, and things go downhill fast.  The God of the garden knows they’ve been bad, so they lie about it, blame each other, and get kicked out.  Not …

Undone by Love: The Redoing

Before I moved to Dallas, I was a manager in the Information Systems department of a medium-sized company that owned funeral homes and cemeteries.  Yes, even funeral homes have information systems.  And, yes, I was a nerd.  The part of my job that I liked the most was facilitating groups of people in a software design process.  I got to …