Link:Faith, Doubt, and Community

Summary of what I was saying and why:
This is always a fun text for me. The perennial question of how unquestioning faith is or should be is one worth revisiting. This year Steve Pankey wrote about what the Greek actually says and I started thinking. There are plenty of people, good faithful people who don’t always believe everything. Even what we’d like to consider the basics.
That has been preached a lot but I remembered an exercise from EfM that let a group explore the things held in common and the things we disagreed on. So I slightly modified that, explored how to introduce and tie things together, and brought my whiteboard out.

Theology: relationship
Jesus Count: low
Good News: faith is practiced in relationship

What did I change on my feet?
Anytime you introduce a lot interaction into a sermon it becomes hard to script too much. I had a pretty good sense of what I was going to say at the beginning and the end. I was fairly sure my congregation would go along with the middle. This time I was right.
What didn’t work/what did I miss?
This is a hard question to answer with this kind of a sermon.
What did work?
Most of this sermon depended on there being a space where people could speak honestly–or at least honestly enough. That seemed to happen this time.

Other sermons I liked:

Priest Arnold highlights the Eucharists beautifully “Through our prayers, God’s grace, the movement of the Holy Spirit, Christ is present for us to touch, to eat, to drink his life into our own.”

Bishop Fisher considers what the interim week was like for Thomas.

Priest Pankey followed his post with a great sermon, “Don’t Doubt Thomas”

Deacon Pam reminds us how important the woundedness of Jesus is.

(Don’t see your sermon or a sermon you liked? Maybe I don’t know about it. Leave me a comment with a link and I’ll take a look.)