MTP Sermon Resources

Matthew 21:1-11 April 9, 2017 (Palm Sunday) • Mount Pleasant UMC It is a scene that is both simple and profound. It’s also a scene we watch every year, and it’s easy to begin to think we know everything we need to know about how it comes out and what it means. Sort of like that movie your family watches every year, and you can all repeat the words line for line: you know how it comes out, and yet you still watch it. We sort of approach Palm Sunday and Holy Week that way. Here we go again. Jesus is headed down the hillside, and we know that by Friday he’ll be hanging on a cross, but even that doesn’t bother us or affect us all that much because we already know that by Sunday he’ll be risen. So here we go into Holy Week again, one more time. Because we’re so familiar with it, it’s easy to miss the wonder of this story. Yes, Jesus enters Jerusalem on this day and he knows he has come here to die. But this week is about more than a donkey ride, a last supper and a horrible ...

John 13:1-17 April 2, 2017 • Mount Pleasant UMC They are all around us. Most everywhere you look, you can see them. They are the markers of success, the dividing lines between the “haves” and the “have nots.” We live in a world increasingly obsessed with status and status symbols, with being seen as important and valuable. We could probably all name certain brands that are understood as marking someone’s status of having “arrived.” If you drive a certain car or own a house in a particular neighborhood, if you can afford luxury hotels or expensive restaurants, then you are seen as “successful.” Name brands on clothes (though not just any name brands—ask a teenager to tell you what the current “right” ones are), certain occupations or income brackets, particular titles, or even “VIP Seating” at concerts, ballgames or other events. A “gold card” used to mean you were someone important; now that’s not good enough. It has to be at least a platinum card—and I'm not sure what...

Luke 17:1-6 March 19, 2017 • Mount Pleasant UMC I remember it like it was yesterday, even though it was probably about fifteen years ago now. It was a beautiful spring day, and why the kids were not outside playing I do not know, but somehow they had gotten the idea that they would have great fun that day blowing bubbles in the kitchen of our home. Someone had gotten them those bottles of soap bubbles with the little wand, and I could hear them laughing and giggling from the back part of the house. Now, the way that house was constructed, the kitchen was in the middle of the house; you have to go through the kitchen to get to the other part of the house. And the kitchen had a linoleum floor. Maybe you’ve figured out where I’m going with this. I decided to go see what they were having so much fun doing, and the minute I walked into the kitchen, stepping onto the linoleum floor in my bare feet, a floor covered with soap bubble residue—well, it was like a cartoon. My feet ...

Luke 9:46-50 March 12, 2017 • Mount Pleasant UMC It was supposed to be a nice afternoon outing to a movie, but things never quite go the way they are planned when you are the parent of an autistic son. Still, Emily Colson (daughter of the late Charles Colson) had taken then-23-year-old Max to a movie before, and he had done quite well after he got adjusted. Into the packed theater they stepped, found a seat, but when the first preview came on, it was thunderously loud, and Max was surprised. “I want to go home!” he cried out. Emily assured him their movie would start soon, and then came the next preview which featured Kermit the Frog, one of Max’s favorites, which helped him settle down. That is, until the feature film came on, which once again startled him. “I want to go home!” he cried out again. And that was when the real drama began. An older woman seated near them yelled at Emily, “Are you going to make him be quiet?” Emily started to explain to the woman that ...