MTP Sermon Resources

Luke 2:1-20 December 24, 2016 (Candlelight) • Mount Pleasant UMC Three miles southeast of Bethlehem sits a hill. It’s not a natural hill, or an ordinary hill in any sense of the word. There is a modest natural hill nearby, but that wasn’t big enough or flashy enough for the king’s purposes. So King Herod built a hill and named it after himself: the Herodium. He brought in huge quantities of dirt and rock, making the mountain bigger and bigger, and then he built a lavish palace on top of it and down inside of it, complete with elaborate escape tunnels, a synagogue inside the walls and a swimming pool—229 feet by 150 feet—at the foot of the mountain surrounded by another palace. Think of that—a huge swimming pool, in the middle of the desert. The waste of water for such recreational activities, in a place where many if not most people lived in poverty, is staggering to contemplate. Yet I doubt Herod rarely thought about it, because this mountain, this Herodium, was not just ...

Isaiah 9:6; John 10:11-18 December 11, 2016 • Mount Pleasant UMC Cathy and I have lived in a lot of different settings in our twenty-seven years of marriage. Our first home after our wedding was a small house her parents owned in Muncie, where we lived for three months before heading to Wilmore, Kentucky. That house had five rooms, and the married student apartment we moved into in Wilmore had two rooms. The kitchen was a hallway between the bedroom and the living room. And did I mention cinder block walls? You get to know your neighbors in that setting, whether you want to or not. I learned from the two single guys above us that it’s impossible to carry a basketball across the living room floor. At the end of our first year there, we got a notice that they were converting those apartments into townhouses, so we would have to move. We took that opportunity to upgrade…to a three-room apartment with cinder block walls. I learned this week that those buildings we lived in ha...

Isaiah 9:6; Mark 1:21-28 December 4, 2016 • Mount Pleasant UMC VIDEO: “Bruce Almighty” clip Bruce wanted to meet God, challenged God to “smite” him. Job, in the Bible, did something similar. Like Bruce in the film, Job wanted to plead his case with God, to show God that he, Job, knew better than the creator of the universe. In some ways, the film Bruce Almighty is a retelling of the Job tale, with one twist: Bruce is given, for a time, the supposed powers of God, but it proves to be more than Bruce can handle. But we understand Bruce’s situation, don’t we? Aren’t there times in our lives, when we simply don’t understand why things are happening, and we being to think, whether we use the words or not, that  if we could just have an audience with God, if we could just explain to him our side of things and why what he’s doing is so wrong, he would understand and change what’s happening? And yet, as Bruce learns in the film and as Job learns in the Bible, God sees so...

Isaiah 9:6; Luke 2:1-3 November 27, 2016 • Mount Pleasant UMC William Shakespeare’s famous play Romeo and Juliet contains an often-quoted question, perhaps taken a bit out of context. The question comes in the midst of Act 2, Scene 2 of the play when Juliet calls out to Romeo to deny his name. She argues that it doesn’t matter that their families are rivals, or that his last name is hated by her family. And that’s when she asks this: “What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…” The implication, and the meaning we have when we use that phrase, is that the name isn’t what matters. It’s who the person is or what a thing is that counts, whatever it might be called. Not to question the Bard, but I have to disagree, at least to some extent. I believe names are important. Knowing a person’s name gives you access to that person. Names tell you something about a person or a thing. When Cathy was pregnant with Christopher, we spent qui...