Well, could God have stopped the earthquake? Most of us would say, Yes. But God didn’t. And we are driven back to silence. There is no good answer. My faith and my hope is that God is with the suffering people of Haiti and everywhere people are suffering. It has been said that God’s heart is the first to break. As William Sloane Coffin has said, “God is short on protection and long on companionship.”

The ability to make and enjoy music is a wonderful gift from the hand of God. To my knowledge every human society on the face of the earth employs and enjoys the gift of music.

How do we make decisions? How do we discern the will of God? We start with scripture, scripture through the lens of Jesus. We pray and listen to our own guts. And we seek the wisdom and discernment of our trusted Christian friends. If we get all three to line up, we can with confidence move forward.

Follow Jesus. Read the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, so you know what that means, to follow Jesus. Then read them again. Start with the gospel of Luke and you will fall in love with Jesus.

At the end of the day, Jesus didn’t actually answer the question about eternal life. He talked about the here and now. He said, “Come near… come near… so you can see… this child of God. Provide the compassionate care that is needed…love your neighbor (and your enemy) as much as you love yourself. Do this… and live.”

December 29, 2019

Like Simeon and Anna, let us be faithful in our waiting and working, our longing and hoping. The world is going to be won over by true power, the power of love.

Pastor Bill Chadwick | December 24, 2019
Luke 2:1-19
I was talking on the phone with our youngest, Anji. She asked how I was and answered, “Great…except I haven’t yet found a really good story for my Christmas Eve sermon.”
“Well…,” she replied, “You could always tell that old one about Mary giving birth to the baby Jesus.”
After another week of intermittent searching for that dynamite story, I came to the realization that perhaps her sarcasm was, in fact, a “word from the Lord.”
Let me tell you a story. It needs a bit of an introduction.

Sermon by Bill Chadwick | December 22, 2019
Bethlehem, the little town about six miles south of Jerusalem, was normally not a prominent city bustling with commerce or government buildings.
But 1000 years before Jesus, it was the home of the shepherd boy, David, and the place where he was anointed by the great prophet Samuel. David became Israel’s greatest king and it was from his lineage that the Jews expected the Messiah to come.
Bethlehem.

Sermon by Bill Chadwick | December 15, 2019 There were only two wise men left. I sat slumped back in my chair, far from the typewriter, arms crossed, legs outstretched: the universal body language for writer’s block. I gazed out the window of my second-floor study onto the scene below. A fresh blanket of snow…

The Spirit of God is moving. Here today in this place. Out there in the world where you live and breathe.