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A sermon given by Rev. Roger Paine on Earth Sunday, April 21, 2013
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
– W.B. Yeats
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is from Edward O. Wilson’s book, THE FUTURE OF LIFE. His prologue is a letter to Henry David Thoreau. He wants Henry to know that his book, Walden, has reached “across five generations” and still speaks to us today. And he mourns the fact that Henry “left too soon,” but “your restless spirit haunts us still.” Here’s an excerpt from Dr. Wilson’s letter to Thoreau:
Dear Henry,
I understand why you came to Walden Pond. You chose this spot primarily to study nature. But you could have done that as easily and far more comfortably on daily excursions from your mother’s house in Concord Center, half an hour’s walk away, where in fact you did frequently repair for a decent meal. Nor was your little cabin meant to be a wilderness hermitage. No wilderness lay within easy reach anyway, and even the woods around Walden Pond had shrunk to their final thin margins by the 1840′s.
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A sermon given by Rev. Roger Paine on Sunday, April 14, 2013
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“A human being is constantly ‘under construction,’
but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.”
– Jose Saramago
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is from Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 12, verses 6-8. I’m using the New Living Translation:
God has given us different gifts for doing certain things well. So if your gift is prophecy, speak out according to your faith. If your gift is serving others, serve them well. If it is teaching, teach well. If your gift is to encourage others, devote yourself to doing so. If your gift is leadership, then lead with passion. If you have a gift for showing kindness to others, do it gladly. Use your gifts with no strings attached.
2. Our second reading is from a talk given by Dr. Richard Farson at the Cusp Conference in 2008. The Cusp Conference is about “the design of everything.” It’s based on the idea that everything that exists has been designed – by people, by nature, or by some other force. The conference brings together architects, innovators, visionaries and explorers from the arts, sciences, technology, business and design – so they can bounce off each other and see what comes out of it.
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A sermon given by Aaron Stockwell on Sunday, April 7, 2013
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First Reading:
Our first reading is known as the Parable of the Sower, it can be found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as well as the Gospel of Thomas. The version I’m sharing with you this morning is from the fourth chapter of Mark, verse 1-8. This is from the Common English Bible.
Jesus began to teach beside the lake again. Such a large crowd gathered that he climbed into a boat there on the lake. He sat in the boat while the whole crowd was nearby on the shore. He said many things to them in parables. While teaching them, he said, “Listen to this! A farmer went out to scatter seed. As he was scattering seed, some fell on the path; and the birds came and ate it. Other seed fell on rocky ground where the soil was shallow. They sprouted immediately because the soil wasn’t deep. When the sun came up, it scorched the plants; and they dried up because they had no roots. Other seed fell among thorny plants. The thorny plants grew and choked the seeds, and they produced nothing. Other seed fell into good soil and bore fruit. Upon growing and increasing, the seed produced in one case a yield of thirty to one, in another case a yield of sixty to one, and in another case a yield of one hundred to one.”
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A sermon given by Rev. Gary Smith on Easter Sunday, March 31, 2013
Maybe you left the story last Sunday with Jesus having come down from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem, come down among all the crowds and the cries hailing him as the Messiah, an entrance fit for a King, we would say, and then, somewhere and sometime after this chaos, Jesus has some private moment, a private moment just short of the city of Jerusalem during which, according to Luke, he weeps, a moment in which he cries, not for himself, but for the city itself; he cries, not for himself, but for others. Here is the choice before Jesus, to enter Jerusalem or to turn away, to face the authorities or to continue a ministry of revolution. When we left the story, Jesus has ridden on to Jerusalem, entered the temple there, looked around and continued on with his disciples to Bethany for the night.
It has not been an uneventful week: the day we call Maundy Thursday, remembering the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples and then Good Friday, the tumultuous day of his arrest, his ridiculous trial, and his tragic death. Thursday called Maundy because of a Latin word that remembers Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, reminding them that he is no king but is a servant to the end. Friday called Good, and I cannot imagine why, unless for the irony of it all, just as when we say “good-bye” and there is nothing good about the leave-taking at all.
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