[Propertalk] Fw: Sermon Resources for June 6 - Part 2

[Joe Parrish]

We Are in the Middle of It

Years ago a man was traveling by ship with his young daughter across the ocean. Earlier that particular Sunday he had preached a sermon about God's love. It had been a very difficult service to preach, because he was newly widowed.

He was standing against the rail of the ship, looking out at the vast and magnificent ocean, when his daughter asked him if God loved them as much as they had loved her late mother.

"Of course He does," answered her father. "There is absolutely nothing bigger or more powerful and all-consuming than God's love for us. It's the biggest thing there is!" The little girl pressed on for more information, wanting to know exactly how big God's love was. Finally her father with great tenderness said, "Well, look across the sea as far as you can. Look up and down and all around. God's love stretches around to cover all of that; above the blue sky and deeper than the deepest part of the ocean underneath us."

The little girl pondered for a minute and replied, "And to think Daddy, we're right in the middle of it." And we are. We're right in the middle of God's love. We don't need a miracle to tell us that. Most of us have known God's love all our lives. Of course, that is not to say that miracles do not occur. They do--to the eyes of faith.

King Duncan, Collected Sermons, www.Sermons.com

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The Widow of Nain

Christ said, 'Weep Not,' but still she went on weeping
The mother thus, how will the son obey?
'Young Man, arise;' lo! From the bier up-leaping,
The Dead proved quicker than the quick that day.

Anonymous, Poets' Life of Christ, compiled by Norman Ault
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Who Jesus Raised to Life

If you ask most Christians who Jesus raised to life, the most common response you would get would be "Lazarus." How could we miss the story of the raising of the brother of Mary and Martha? The three days in the tomb caused the sisters to warn Jesus that Lazarus would "stinketh." What a great word, "stinketh"! It sounds like something you would say about a high school locker room after a big basketball game. The resurrection story found in the chapter 11 of the Gospel of John is THE story that springs to mind when we talk about the incredible power of Jesus even over the minions of death. But here in chapter 7 of Luke, we have another miraculous resurrection of an individual without much fanfare or comment: a miracle that ranks right up there with walking on water and bringing sight to the blind, but which gets less than exciting press coverage. I have a feeling that we tend to leave it alone because we get embarrassed by it. 

You see, this is a miracle without much explanation or theological intrigue. It happens so quickly that we read it, swallow hard and move on.

Alexander H. Wales, The Chain Of Command, CSS Publishing

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The Price of Mourning

The home of Paul Laurence Dunbar, noted poet, is open to the public in Dayton, Ohio. When Dunbar died, his mother left his room exactly as it was on the day of his death. At the desk of this brilliant man was his final poem, handwritten on a pad.

After his mother died, her friends discovered that Paul Laurence Dunbar's last poem had been lost forever. Because his mother had made his room into a shrine and not moved anything, the sun had bleached the ink in which the poem was written until it was invisible. The poem was gone.

If we stay in mourning, we lose much of life.     

Henry Simon

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God's Plan for Renewal

For Jesus, God had a plan for the recovery and renewal of all people on earth, and his mission was - he believed and staked his life on this - to initiate that plan to bring in the fullness of the kingdom of God.

If Alvin Toffler, author of The Third Wave, is right, we need that kind of hope more than ever. In the face of economic chaos all over the world, Toffler insists that we are going through something more drastic than recession and temporary hardship. He believes that we are suffering the "birth pains of a new civilization." Arthur Coxe's verse sounds so contemporary:

We are living, we are dwelling, in a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling to be living is sublime.
Hark! the waking up of nations; God and Magog to the fray.
Hark! what soundeth? 'Tis creation groaning for its latter day.

Hope in God helps us to make sense out of the senseless turn of events in our time, in all time, because hope enables us to endure and to press on in the face of present and impending tragedies.

The conclusion to this illustration and for many additional illustrations and sermons for Proper 5 can be accessed at www.Sermons.com.
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