Text: Luke 4:14-30 After a long, harsh, not-so-silent retreat in the wilderness with the devil constantly carping in his ear, Jesus returns to Galilee. About his return, Luke says, “He [Jesus] began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.” Now that is a phrase that warms every preacher’s heart – “praised by everyone.” The crowd adores Jesus, after all, he is a local lad made good, a fine, strapping young man who can make the boring Bible come to life, a reli

Text: John 2:1-11 The first sermon I ever heard preached on this story in John’s Gospel was not by a preacher and it was not in a church. No, oddly enough the first sermon I ever heard preached on this story came from inside a novel in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s, The Brothers Karamazov. The sermon begins: It was very late, according to the monastery ideas, when Alyosha returned to the hermitage; the doorkeeper let him in by a special entrance. It had struck nine o'clock-

Text: Isaiah 42:1-9 Two very different groups of people first heard the Servant Song from Isaiah 42. One group was a hodgepodge of Judeans the Babylonians left behind in Jerusalem after they hauled away the hardiest and healthiest citizens into exile. Of those left behind, Richard Ward writes, “Their homeland had become a . . . wilderness of a different kind. It was not a wilderness where bushes burned with a Word from God, where manna fell from the sky, or where a rock yield

Text: Jeremiah 31:7-14 If John the Baptist is the unlikely poster prophet for Advent, Jeremiah is the even more unlikely poster prophet for Christmas. This surly prophet does not bother putting up a tree for the season because he sees exile on the horizon. Why decorate the house for the holidays when not just the decorations, but the house itself is coming down? While his contemporaries preach, “Believe in God and all will be well,” Jeremiah preaches, “Time to pack whatever y