Sermon text: Matthew 6:25-34

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Acouple of months ago I told you a joke about a patient in a mental hospital who spent every day with his ear against his hospital room wall, listening intently. One day the patient called for one of the nurses to come into his room to listen too. The nurse came in and pressed his ear against the wall for several minutes and finally said, "I don't hear anything." "I know," replied the patient, "it's been like that every day!" So it is with us at times. We cling to an invisible wall waiting for something drastic to happen and it never does. We spend much of our time worrying ourselves into another world.

Sermon text: Luke 20:9-19

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I want to use this morning to not only take a look at our passage in Luke, but to pull Jesus’ parables together for a common theme. The parables are wildly diverse in their characters and subject matter, but they do have a thread of similarity too. I believe if you had to pick one component that is present in every aspect of the Gospel, including every parable, it is response. There is a lot of information in the Bible and it is all important for us to know, but its point is not simply for us to know it, but to prompt some sort of response to it. It is given to us as revelation, God telling us about himself and ourselves, so that we will do something with it.

Sermon text: Luke 19:11-27

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When I turned 16, my parents bought me a car. It was a red 1989 Chrysler Lebaron convertible. It was awesome. It was turbo charged and had a black vinyl top. I have so many great stories with that car.

One time a bunch of my friends and I were swimming at my hometown public pool in the evening when it was closed. I should have probably had the sound booth stop the tape during that admission. Well when we were done swimming we were going to jump in my car and drive around town for a while with the top down. My friend Brian jumped into the back seat and someone else jumped into the passenger seat. They pull the door shut and I hear Brian say, “open the door. Open the door. Open the door!!!!!!.” It turns out when my friend pull the door shut from the passenger seat, Brian had his hand on the frame of the car right where the door latches. His hand was shut in the door when it latched. I will never forget his reaction when I think of that car.

Sermon text: Luke19:9-14

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There is an effect called the overconfidence effect. It is a bias in which people are correct in their judgments far less often than they think they are. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as “99% certain” turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.

Sermon text: Luke 18:1-8

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I hate to wait. Waiting can be excruciating.

That is one of the most ridiculous things about law school. You would think after you get a law degree that you would be ready to practice law, but nope. You have to pay a couple thousand dollars to take a class that prepares you for the bar exam. So you spend the entire summer after law school graduation preparing for the bar exam and then you take the exam over 2 days in July. But the worst part is that you don't get the results of the bar exam until October. So you start working, or in my case, I started seminary, which is not so common. And you just wait. When you sign up for the exam, they give you an identification number and then they tell you that there will be a two week time period in July where the exam results will be posted online. If you number is on the website, you pass. If your number is not on the website then you did not pass. Luckily my number was on the website and I passed, but the wait was awful. I actually checked the website every day for weeks to make sure my number was still up there and I actually printed the screen a few times just to be able to prove that it was on there in case they tried to take my number off or something. The waiting is excruciating and what are we to do when we are waiting.