Santa Monica Nazarene Church Church of the Nazarene

In this sermon on Easter Sunday we turn to the resurrection of Jesus as Mark’s gospel tells it. We embrace the strangeness of Mark’s version and, with a little help again from The Shawshank Redemption, we hear the good news that Jesus is out there calling us into a future not foreclosed by death but made possible through his rising from the dead.

In this sermon on Good Friday we riff on a song lyric as way to grasp the heart of God on display in the death of Jesus. “I should’ve told you I could live without you, but I don’t want to.”

In this sermon we look at the story about Jesus cleansing the temple. We walk briskly through a history of the temple, into how it changed with Jesus, and then what it has to do with us and the cleansing of our own lives. 

In this sermon we look at a moment in Jesus’ ministry as establishing something crucial about his work of salvation and who we are called to be as people, which is to serve.

In this sermon we return again to John the Baptist, however we focus on what it means for John (and for us) to point to Jesus. Touring through the lectionary passages for the day, we find that pointing to Jesus means imitating him.

In this sermon we join John the baptist “on the frontier as the ages collide” asking once again what it means to prepare the way for the Lord. We look at the opening lines of Mark’s gospel, what I’ve been learning about cooking, and a question.