Sermon for August 28, 2016

Sermon for Rally Day, August 28, 2016

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 28, 2016

St. Paul Lutheran Church, Wallis, Texas

Sermon Text:  Hebrews 13:1-17

Sermon Theme:  “An Unchanging Christ in a Changing World”

(Sources:  Brokhoff, Series C, Preaching Workbook; The Parables of Peanuts, The Gospel According to Peanuts; original ideas; Emphasis Online Illustrations; Footnotes, Life Application Study Bible)

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Rally Day officially launches the new School Year for the Sunday School Department.  It’s a time for celebration by leaders and students, which took place yesterday at the Woolley’s, and a time for preparation by the teachers as they plan to lead, whether they teach adults or they teach children.  Our sermon text says, “Remember your leaders who spoke to you the word of God . . . Obey your leaders, . . . for they are keeping watch over your souls.”

Of course, it is really God who works through these leaders.

As all of us, and especially the children, face future living, we need to have solid, basic guidelines by which to order our lives.  Today, we are living in a time of confusion, startling changes, moral and ethic dilemmas, and recurrent violence.  There is a breakdown in moral standards.  Things we once abhorred are done today as a normal way of life.  We are confused, we do not know whether to resist or go along with the new morality.  We feel empty from this growing loss of spiritual values.  Our text offers some hope.

This changing world was already changing when Charles M. Schulz was drawing his Peanuts comic strip (Schulz died in 2000).  For example, Charlie Brown was surprised when Violet Gray, a girl who had a crush on him, said that her parents used to belong to a church, but now they belong to a coffee house.  Charlie himself represents America’s values the way they used to be, while some of his friends begin to reflect the moral and ethical changes for the worse.

Violet Gray, for example, would hold the football for Charlie to kick, and then let it go, because she was afraid he might kick her hand.  Lucy Van Pelt, on the other hand, would let go of the football right before the kick just for spite or meanness.  Violet had no faith, and Lucy had too few Christ-like character traits in her.  The guidelines of Jesus were much more prevailing in Charlie. Continue reading

Sermon for August 21, 2016

Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 21, 2016, St. Paul Lutheran Church, Wallis, Texas

Sermon Text:  Hebrews 12:4-24

Sermon Theme:  “The Fire of God”

(Sources:  Emphasis Online Commentary; Emphasis Online Illustrations; The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible; Harper’s Bible Dictionary; original ideas; “Moses Jokes” Online; “What Really Happened at Mount Sinai,” thetorah.com; Online Bible Gateway; Believer’s Commentary; Concordia Pulpit Resources, Volume 26, Part 3, Series C)

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

The late Charlton Heston, who played Moses in The Ten Commandments, once said in an interview that there were hundreds of Moses jokes and that he had heard every one of them.  So he probably heard the one I’m going to tell, but maybe you haven’t.

Three men, including Moses and Jesus, were playing golf together one day.  Moses walked up to the tee, and drove a long one.  The ball landed in the fairway, but rolled directly toward a water hazard.  Quickly, Moses raised his club, the water parted, and the ball rolled to the other side, safe and sound.

Next, Jesus strolled up to the tee and hit a nice long one directly toward the same water hazard.  It landed right in the middle of the pond and kind of hovered over the water.  Jesus casually walked on the water and chipped the ball onto the green.

The third person got up and randomly whacked the ball.  It headed out over the fence and into oncoming traffic on a nearby street.  It bounced off a truck and hit a nearby tree.  From there, it bounced onto the roof of a shack close by and rolled down into the gutter, down the drain spout, out onto the fairway and straight toward the aforementioned pond.

On the way to the pond, the ball hit a stone and bounced out over the water onto a lily pad, where it rested quietly.  Suddenly, a very large bullfrog jumped up on a lily pad and snatched the ball into his mouth.  Just then, an eagle swooped down and grabbed the frog and flew away.  As they passed over the green, the frog squealed with fright and dropped the ball, which bounced right into the cup for a hole in one.

Looking annoyed, Moses turned to Jesus and said, “I hate playing golf with your Dad!”

This joke suggests that God often acts in what seems like strange and complicated ways.

In last Sunday’s sermon, we took a look at the letter to the Hebrews through the third verse of Chapter 12.  In today’s text from Hebrews, we pick up where we left off last Sunday.  If you had trouble interpreting the text, don’t feel alone; many folks do.  I think that’s just another reason why we can be sure the letter wasn’t written by the Apostle Paul.  Paul’s writings were very structured, analytical, and even legalistic, — he laid it out clearly and you understood it.  Not true of whoever wrote Hebrews. Continue reading

Sermon for August 14, 2016

Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 14, 2016, St. Paul Lutheran Church, Wallis, Texas

Sermon Text:  Hebrews 12:1-3

Sermon Theme: “Run with Endurance”

(Sources:  Anderson’s Cycle C Preaching Workbook; Harper’s Bible Dictionary; Life-Application Study Bible; Online Running and Jogging Jokes; Footnotes, Concordia Self-Study Bible; original ideas; Emphasis Online Illustrations; Believer’s Commentary)

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Michael Johnson, winner of four Olympic gold medals and eight World Championships gold medals, and 400 meter world-record setter, is considered the greatest and most consistent sprinter in the history of track and field.

Well, this icon among runners went to a fancy restaurant club with his friends.  He was dressed in a T-shirt and blue jeans, attire which violated the dress code of this elegant establishment.

At the door he was told, “Sorry, sir, you can’t come in here dressed like that.”

Michael was quite annoyed at this, and he retorted, “Don’t you know who I am?  I’m Michael Johnson!”

“Then it won’t take you long to run home and change, will it?,” said the maitre d’.

Michael Johnson has now retired from running, so the favorite for winning this year’s Olympic gold medal in the 400 meter at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is Kirani James from Grenada.  A new hero in the making!?

Back in the days when our sermon text was written, in Asia Minor where Paul, Barnabas, Apollos, Timothy, and others served as missionaries, the original Olympics games, as well as less prestigious track events such as those at Corinth and Ephesus, were greatly loved, enjoyed and followed by just about everyone, including Paul and his fellow workers.  I mention this because the picture language used by the writer to the Hebrews is about running a race. Continue reading

Sermon for August 07, 2016

Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

August 7, 2016, St. Paul Lutheran Church, Wallis, Texas

Sermon Text:  Luke 12:22-34

Sermon Theme:  “Fear Not, Little Flock”

(Sources:  Emphasis Online Illustrations; Emphasis Online Commentaries; original ideas; Concordia Pulpit Resources, Volume 26, Part 3, Series C; Life Application Study Bible; Brokhoff, Series C, Preaching Workbook; Uniijokes.com; Online Sermon Illustrations, RE Images; Online Clean Jokes; Believer’s Bible Commentary)

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

At the beginning of today’s sermon text, Jesus says, “Do not be anxious about your life,” and at the end of the text He says, “Fear not, little flock.”  Worry, anxiety, and fear are so prevalent in America today that they keep psychiatrists well supplied with customers.

Psychiatrists call extreme fears “phobias”; there are over a hundred phobias, including acrophobia, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, glossophobia, autophobia, xenophobia, choronophobia, ergophobia, and tetraphobia, just to name a few.

Tetraphobia  is a fear of monsters, and is usually seen in children.  However, there was grown man, who still suffered from this fear.  Finally, he went to a psychiatrist and explained that he had this terrible fear that there was a monster under his bed.  Not only does he live in terror, but he never gets any sleep.  The psychiatrist said he could cure the man in about forty or fifty sessions.

“How much do you charge?”  the man asked.

“Eighty-five dollars per session,” replied the psychiatrist.

Since the man couldn’t afford to pay so much, he left the shrink’s office and stopped in at the local bar to ease his frustration, telling the bartender all about his phobia.  The bartender said he knew a sure-proof, cost-free way to get rid of his fear, and he shared it with the man, who took the bartender’s advice, and soon his fear of monsters was conquered.

So he just had to drop by the psychiatrist’s office to brag about his cost-free, successful cure.

“How did this bartender cure you of your tetraphobia?” the shrink asked.

“He told me to cut off the legs of the bed, which I did, and now there’s nobody under there!”

It is a fact that 40 percent of the things the average person fears will never happen; 30 percent of the average person’s worries are about the past, and that can’t be changed; 12 percent of most people’s anxieties are about criticisms coming from other people, almost all of which are untrue.  Ten percent of the average person’s worries are about their health, and your health actually gets worse when you worry.  And only 8 percent is about real problems that have to be faced.

In our text, Jesus is essentially saying, ‘The beginning of anxiety is the end of faith, and the beginning of faith is the end of anxiety.’  A true Christian is free from fear because of his faith in God; that’s why Jesus said, “Fear not, little flock.” Continue reading

Sermon for July 31, 2016

Sermon for Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

July 31, 2016, St. Paul Lutheran Church, Wallis, Texas

Sermon Text:  Colossians 3:1-11

Sermon Theme:  “Heads Down or Heads Up?”

(Sources:  Brokhoff, Series C, Preaching Workbook; Anderson’s Cycle C Preaching Workbook; Emphasis Online Commentaries; Emphasis Online Examples; The Parables of Peanuts; Online Peanuts Cartoons; original ideas)

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Back in the days when Charles M. Shulz drew his Peanuts’ cartoon strip from 1950 until 2000, he presented a microcosm of human life to the world, from a Christian perspective.  Although Shulz died in 2000, the sayings and doings of his Peanuts’ characters are still being read and loved today; and we who read them notice that the world hasn’t changed for the better since 2000, — actually, things seem to have gotten worse.

As in real life, Shulz’s characters run the gamut of all levels of good and bad human behavior.  Lucy probably shows the most examples of un-Christ-like behavior, and Snoopy and Charlie Brown are at the other end of the spectrum, with other characters, like Linus and Schroeder, in between.

In one strip, Lucy tells Charlie Brown and Linus, “I think it is possible to be too nice.”  As they look dumbfounded, she continues, “By golly, nobody’s gonna walk all over me!  NO SIR!  If anybody’s gonna do any walking, it’s gonna be me!”

She continues ranting out loud as she stalks off, “There’s only one way to survive these days . . .you have to walk over THEM before they walk over YOU!”

After Lucy is gone, Linus says to Charlie, “It must be nice to have a philosophy that will sustain you in times of need.”

Charlie’s little sister, Sally, tries, but often has a hard time being good and acting Christ-like.  In one cartoon, Sally shouts in exasperation, “What do you mean, I’ve got to be good all the time?!!  Don’t I get weekends off?”

In another strip, Snoopy says, “I don’t have time to hate people who hate me because I’m too busy loving people who love me.”

Too often, most of us are like Lucy and Sally rather than like Snoopy.  Too often, we live according to earthly values.  Usually, we walk with heads down, seeing worldly things, thinking negative thoughts, and saying and doing sinful things.  A Christian lives in two worlds – in this world of materials and vices, and in a higher world of heavenly values where Christ is.  Is it going to be heads down or heads up?!

Since Jesus has ascended into heaven, we on earth must look to Him for our values, goals, and ideals while here on earth.  Our lives are impoverished by preoccupation with worldly values leading us into negative thoughts and wicked actions.  The wagon of life needs to be hitched to the star of Christ. Continue reading