Weekly Sermons

Toward the end of May, I recall a point lost in November of 1863. President Abraham Lincoln stood on a battle-field in Pennsylvania and said, We can not dedi...

We have been here before. Maybe each of us individually has not, but we the church have. Our wise spiritual parents, the Jews, pray and celebrate each Passov...

Southern Californians of a certain age will appreciate one of my mother's many areas of expertise. After dispatching cranes for three companies, two husbands...

I still hear his voice in my head almost twenty years later. Whenever I hear or read something about six feet, which happens a lot these days, I hear the Re...

But we had hoped... Yes indeed. Here at Shepherd of the Valley, we had hoped to baptize little Lauren today. We had hoped to celebrate Jackson's first Commun...

Another week has gone by, and not much has changed. The doors that were locked are now merely shut. Thomas is with the disciples this time, having missed las...

How unusual are these times? The church is out ahead of the rest of the world. I can't ever remember that happening in my ministry before, but here we are, o...

Living in historic times amplifies the echoes of the past. I can't remember so much public interest in the spanish flu, or social media commentary on the gre...

600 years had passed, but the crowds on the road side remembered it still. The Babylonians stormed up this mountain road and captured Jerusalem and its leade...

The beauty of this holy story is how believably human it is. The first sentence identifies a problem. The second sentence describes the conversation about wh...

We're at the start of a long story. The coronavirus pandemic will disrupt life for much longer than anyone wants, which is to say, more than a few hours. Peo...

There's a virus going around; maybe you've heard. The technical term for it is fear. It is spreading very quickly and infecting an alarming number of people....

After baptism, there is a test. For Jesus, it was a grueling six weeks in the wilderness with Satan. For Lutherans, it is even worse: two years in confirmati...

Sometimes, when you are ready to give up, God gives you a transfiguration. We got a late start on our cross country trek to South Carolina when I began semin...

One year for Valentine's Day, I wrote my sweet baboo a poem. The final stanza was an acrostic—the first letter of each line spelled out her name. Maybe somed...

The law that Jesus came not to abolish but to fulfill was God's word to overwhelmed people. They were wandering about forty years in the wilderness, which ha...

Bible scholars contend that Matthew presents Jesus in the image of Moses, but I think he looks like Aladdin. He climbs the mountain and launches into a sermo...

There is a practice for meditating upon Scripture that I encourage you to try...with the annual report. Read a passage and imagine being a part of it. Visual...

It is a delight to be among you today. Pastor Brian invited me to come and be among you and I jumped at the opportunity. We have something big that connects ...