Good News Worth Keeping
Welcome to
I spent most of seminary avoiding my required preaching course. I saved it for the final semester of my three-year master’s program, intimidated by the thought of standing up - let alone preaching - in front of a room full of peers.
Eventually, the moment came. My first sermon was on Genesis 28 and the story of Jacob’s ladder.
At the end of that semester, I was awarded the school’s annual prize for excellence in preaching. I was stunned. Not only had I done the thing I feared most, I discovered I loved it, and that I might even be called to it.
Fourteen years later, preaching has become one of the great joys of my life. I’ve come to see it as a kind of midwifery: the careful, hopeful work of bringing the gospel into the world, again and again, for people who need good news.
This newsletter is a home for that work - sermon manuscripts, videos, and reflections. For something that takes so much time, prayer, and attention to create, it feels right to give these sermons a life beyond a single Sunday morning.
The Making of a Villain Series
Welcome to this summer series on the Bible’s most complicated antagonists not asking what they did but what shaped them and what ultimately led them to the choices they made.
My hope is that in looking at these stories, we will remember that these antagonists are not so different from us. Like them, we live with the same freedom. Like them, we make choices too. And like them, we navigate the ever-present tension between possibility and peril.
I want these stories to serve as a kind of mirror that we hold before us, revealing both our own capacity for failure and our own capacity for faithfulness. Said another way, I want these stories to remind us of the invitation that is always before us - to choose and do better.
Haman
Yesterday marked the 250th birthday of our nation. The nation I have called home for nearly four decades. I celebrated by picking up my kids from camp in the Hill Country, listening to country music, eating a cheeseburger (which is close enough to a hot dog) and watching fireworks…. Read More.
Absalom
On Friday night, several of us Royal Laners went to see a production of West Side Story in Rockwall starring one of our own fellow church members, Cara Craggett. Kenna and I had never seen West Side Story, so by the time intermission came we were very curious to know where the story was going. Now, because Kenna and I are both pretty impatient people, we decided to google the ending while waiting in line for concessions, just so we would know if it was a happy ending or not….Read More.
Cain
Rev. Dr. Simon Cross is a public theologian and Reformed United Church minister who wrote a great essay recently about how we are to understand the stories of creation and the fall. In the essay, he makes clear that the creation story was never meant to be read as a forensic account of how the universe began. And the story of the fall was never meant to be seen as a “courtroom transcript” of the moment humanity messed up…Read More.
Explore More of My Writing
When Truth Draws Near
A Sermon on Luke 24:13-35
I took a Psychology 101 class in college and participated once in the “invisible gorilla experiment.” Here’s how it worked: Our class watched a 60 second video of six kids passing a basketball back and forth in the middle of a gymnasium, and as we watched, we were instructed to count how many times the ball got passed. When the video was over, each of us were prepared to share the number we counted, but instead, they asked which of us noticed the gorilla in the video. To be honest, we were all a little confused…Read More.
The Power of Performance
A Sermon on Matthew 21:1-11
I’m a big Broadway fan. In fact, Matt and I go to New York at least once or twice a year and every time we do we make sure to see at least one Broadway performance. We’ve seen a lot of shows over the last several years and every time we see one I’m reminded why I love Broadway so much…Read More.
When God Couldn’t Wait
A Sermon on Sermon on Luke 2:1-20
I have three children - ages 10, 8, and 4 - which are great ages for enjoying and embracing the Christmas season. Everything is so magical to them - the Christmas lights, the Christmas music, the winter village at the arboretum, ice skating at the Galleria, the Polar Express Train in Grapevine, you name it. They’re just at the perfect age for experiencing all the holiday magic…Read More.