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The Lord Needs It: Lessons From A Donkey

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This Sunday is Palm Sunday---the beginning of Holy Week.

It's also one of those Sundays when you can't ignore the church calendar and just preach whatever you want.  I am sure that some people do just that, but they probably aren't Presbyterian, and I am sure that the liturgical rhythm of the Church is not first and foremost in their mind.

And they probably have had no trouble at all working on their sermon this week.

I'm not one to blindly follow tradition, but there are some things that you just don't do---and you can't just ignore the story of Jesus' Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.  


But this leads to a bit of a quandary...  In the short time I have been doing this whole preaching thing I have gone through the Palm Sunday story a few times.  After a while you sort of wonder if your congregation has heard your Palm Sunday riff a few too many times.

That sermon needs to get preached, though.  While we celebrate the cheers and palm waving …
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Family Values Week 3: "Simple Living"

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Image via WikipediaWhen I was a kid we had this rotary phone on our wall.  You had to dial the number.  You would stick your fingers into the hole on the rotary that corresponded with the number and you would give it a whirl around until it stopped.  Then you would release your finger and let the dial do it's work.  Then you would repeat.  I used to mess up and would have to hang the phone up to start over.


There was one phone in our house with one line.  If I wanted to talk to my girl, I had to make sure that no one else was planning on using the phone.  When we finally got another phone in the house with a line in my room, my dad would often pick up the other extension and tell me to get off the phone, sometimes when I was in the middle of working some serious game with my special lady friend.
Image via Wikipedia A few years ago, I was working with a group at the church I was serving to clean out some of the junk in the church's attic.  We discovered a huge monstrosity of a m…
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"An Enemy Has Done This" - A September 11th Sermon

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This Sunday is the 10th Anniversary of the September 11th.

Most of us remember vividly where we were on that Tuesday morning ten years ago.

There's something about the tragedy of that day that was---I don't know---more tragic than anything most of us had ever experienced before.

It haunts us, and we live with the reality of the new world it created each and every day.

On Tuesday, September 11th I was working at my desk in the church where I served as the Director of Christian Education. For some reason, there was no one else in the office with me that day. I think the secretary had a doctor's appointment and our very part time interim pastor wasn't there either. We shared office space with the local Fellowship of Christian Athletes branch, and the secretary who worked there came to office with an ashen look on her face to tell me the news that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We didn't have a television in the office and our internet was sl…
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