Rev. Zach

                                                Romans 12:9-21 Today’s reading is so full of beauty and grace that it’s like pulling up a chair to an all you can eat buffet. Rather than trying to get it all on your plate at once, I’m going to encourage you to read it again and again and again and just let it sink in. For our conversation today, there are two words that I want to focus on and two images that I want to share with you. The words I want to lift up are “genuine” and “haughty.” This is not to be confused with the term, “genuine hotty,” which is probably so old that no one says it anymore and you can probably hear my children laughing at me from miles away. Anyway, a “genuine hotty” is (or was) someone who is legitimately attractive. Back in the dark ages of social media, it was not uncommon for someone to try to curate or cultivate images that made others th...

Jonah 1:1-17 “Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” It’s preposterous, right? Yet we love to teach this story to our children. In fact, ours will share it tonight at their first ‘Parables in the Park” meeting! It may not exactly be a parable, but it’s a good story! Most of us who grew up in the church heard it at some point in Sunday School or VBS. Usually, there’s a whale in the story (kind of like in the Disney version of Pinocchio ), and usually, we talk about how God called Jonah and he rebelled. Then Jonah begs for forgiveness and God saves him. That’s really only a small part of the story, though. It’s a good story, but it’s not the whole story. In the interest of time, I thought I might tell the rest of the story in the style of the character Luis from Marvel’s Ant-Man . If you do not know who that is, let’s just say he probably has a worse time than I do managing his ADD. (No, I am not making fun...

Matthew 13:1-23 A few weeks ago I shared the wisdom of my wife teaching our children to ‘focus on the flowers instead of the dirt.’ While that resonated with some, I had at least one person who said, “But I LOVE the dirt. It’s what makes things grow!” All I can say is...good point. Let’s talk about the dirt! After all, that’s what Jesus was talking about in the parable of the sower. First let’s have a word of caution, though. On the surface, it seems like Jesus paints a very one-dimensional tableau of the human condition. In other words, while there are certainly outside forces that we cannot control, none of us should be reduced to an identity as a beaten path, or shallow soil, or even the expectation that we have it all figured out and should yield in abundance every season. It certainly works for the illustration to say some of us are like this and some of us are like that, but I think we need to be aware that – beyond the purpose of realizing our limitations –the purpose of faith i...

Matthew 7:15-29 “The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.” Such words have greater power for those of us who live in a region where we always anticipate the next storm as we watch our coastline disappear and the wetlands become smaller and smaller each year. In fact, part of the witness of this congregation is that we are a host site for mission groups that come into town and respond to the storms of the past and the poverty of the present through the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance program. I don’t say that to boast, in fact, we have not hosted as many groups as we had hoped to, but it’s something that we have done in order to feel like we have some solid ground to stand on when the storms rage and all seems lost. It’s important to know, in times like these, that we have some solid ground to stand on, but I don’t think that’s necessarily all that Jesus had in mind with this pa...