Lord of Love Lutheran Church 18 December 2016 + Fourth Sunday of Advent Isaiah 7.10-16; Matthew 1.18-25 Our first gospel text of Advent brought us a cheery end-of-the-world wake-up call, filled with images of rapture and thieves and catastrophic floods. Then we met the homely locust-eating, camel hair-wearing, name-calling John the Baptist and his brash …
Continue reading A Sermon about How Immanuel Has Nothing (and everything) to Do with Jesus
Lutheran Campus Ministry / Creighton University 11 December 2016 + Third Sunday of Advent Matthew 11.2-11; Isaiah 35.1-10 He had been so sure, so confident, so certain. He proclaimed a bold message of repentance and the dawning of the messianic age: Repent! For the reign of heaven has come near! One who is more powerful …
Continue reading A Blue Christmas Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent
Augustana Lutheran Church 27 November 2016 + First Sunday of Advent Matthew 24.36-44; Romans 13.11-14 Doomsday. The end is near. The rapture is coming. Don’t worry. I haven’t gone rogue or joined an end-of-the-world ultra-fundamentalist cult. But you have to admit there is a certain fascination many people have with some version or another of …
Continue reading Church Interrupted! A Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent
Preached at St. Luke's Evangelical Lutheran Church, Omaha, NE, for a multi-congregational community Thanksgiving Eve service St. Luke’s Lutheran Church 23 November 2016 + Day of Thanksgiving (Eve) John 6.25-35 A quote from a recent New York Times article sums it up this way: “The election is over, but the repercussions in people’s lives may be …
Continue reading A Sermon about Awkward Holiday Dinners, Miracles, and Giving Thanks
As mentioned in my previous post, this year my internship congregation did a special liturgy for Christ the King Sunday, in which we traced the liturgical year, season by season, in a pattern of reading-reflection-hymn. What follows is my short reflection on the gospel pericope for Christ the King, Luke 23.33-43. I am also including …
This year, my internship congregation is doing a special liturgy for Christ the King Sunday. In the "Word" portion of the traditional four-fold ordo, we are tracing the liturgical year from Advent to its culmination in Christ the King, the church's "New Year's Eve" if you will, in a pattern of reading-reflection-hymn. The following Eucharistic …
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love... There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear... We love because he first loved us. Those who say, …
Continue reading Lament, Holy Anger, and Pastoral Encouragement: A Statement on Election Night 2016
Augustana Lutheran Church 30 October 2016 + Reformation Sunday John 8.31-36 There are more than a few one-liners peppered through the Bible—single verses plucked out for their pithy expression of some essential theological truth. Today we encounter one such one-liner: “[Then] you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” The problem, …
Continue reading A Sermon about Being a Church That Is Always Reforming
Augustana Lutheran Church 23 October 2016 + Lectionary 30C Luke 18.9-14 Music permeates our culture. How many times have we caught ourselves singing along (some of us admittedly more poorly than others) to the radio in the car or in the shower? It’s simply hard to imagine life without music. It’s hard, too, to imagine …
Originally published in The Door, the student and community newsletter of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago I often remark that I find it amusing that the first person to whom I came out was a pastor. That was in 2011 and all the more remarkable because it came on the heels of graduating …
Pastor Josh Evans 