Latest Sermon

Here is the link to my latest sermon (to be preached tomorrow):

Copyright. Wrong!

I am off to practice more. I'll let you know how it goes.

Style

I found this video while I was randomly looking up sermons on youtube and was overjoyed to find a black preacher whose style could actually be used in a predominately white, UCC church. This guy is just cool. He has serious style and serious class. So much so in fact that I, true to preacherly form, "borrowed" his opening routine for a pastoral prayer I did two weeks ago.

Here is the clip:



And here is my prayer:
Oh eternal loving God.

We join together today in this house of prayer because you have sustained us and ordained and appointed it to be so.

You have sustained us in our waking this morning, sustained us that we had clothes to put on our backs, sustained us that we had the energy and the will to travel to this place. Truly Lord you have brought us from a long way and willed this moment into being. We know you didn’t have to do it, but we know that you chose to and did do it.

And because you have chosen to sustain us, we can fully and heartfully understand the words of the psalmist, “I rejoiced when they said unto me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’”

You have given us our very being sovereign God and it is cause for much rejoice. But in our being you have endowed us with freedom, freedom that we too often waste in jealousy, in hate, in greed, and in anger. We lift up to you today all the pain and grief caused by these sins we commit one against another and we pray for the strength to free ourselves from these shackles with which we bind ourselves.

We pray likewise for all the sorrows and concerns of our community today.
We lift up to you all in our lives that falls short of the future glory you’ve promised us and for which we continue to strive. Through hardship and trouble, through pain and through fear Lord we struggle but we know we do so with the vision of a better world and a better humanity you provided us through Jesus the Christ.

And so dearest God, we thank you, we praise your holy name today, and pray to you in the name of your beloved son, Jesus the Christ. AMEN.