St. Matthew's Riverside Sermons

We continue this week with our examination of Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus and our text for this morning is, in effect, something of a summary of what we discussed last week.   We noted that the problems for those 1 st century Christians were not unlike the problems we face today, and the world in which they lived was essentially the world in which we live.   There’s an old rule of thumb we can use to determine the credibility of some of the claims we hear about a “new morality” appropriate for Christians in the 21 st century: If it’s new it’s probably not true, and if it’s true it’s probably not new.   That indeed is a central theme of our bible, and Paul is reinforcing this notion with his warnings to the Ephesians. He begins in v.15 by saying “Look then carefully how you walk,”   I heard a story a while back about two nimrods who were deer hunting in northern Wisconsin and through some quirk of fate had managed to bag a rather large 16 point buck.   After field dressin

About a dozen years ago there was a television situation comedy entitled My Name is Earl .   The premise was that in the past, Earl had taken a lot of wrong turns that had harmed many people. then he wins a lottery he has an epiphany and decides to atone by contacting all those whom he has wronged and attempting to undo, insofar as possible, all the damage he has caused. And to do that, he has made a list of all the people he needs to contact and that list goes with him everywhere. On one of the early shows he referred to it as cleaning up the garbage in his life. And perhaps one of the things that made that show popular was the realization that, when it comes to having garbage in our lives, there’s a little bit of Earl in all of us.   We all have emotional and spiritual garbage and clutter we’ve accumulated, and like Earl discovered, it is hard to get rid of and, not infrequently, it just stays with us and we just drag it along with us wherever we go. We may have things in ou

I heard about a little boy who sat down next to his friend in church one Easter Sunday morning and the friend did a double take when he noticed the boy had a really ugly looking black eye. His friend asked, “How’d you get the shiner?” The boy replied, “I ate some Easter candy.” His friend said, “Eating Easter candy doesn’t give you a black eye.” The boy responded, “It does if the candy belongs to your sister!” I heard another Easter story about two brothers who were getting ready to boil some eggs to color for Easter. “I’ll give you ten dollars if you let me break three of these on your head,” said the older one. “Promise?” asked the younger. “Promise!” Gleefully, the older boy broke a raw egg over his brother’s head, then another one. The younger brother braced himself for the last egg, but then nothing happened. Finally, the younger brother growing anxious asked: “Don’t you want to break that third egg?” His brother replied, “I’d love to, but I can’t afford it!”   To be

The “Maundy” of Maundy Thursday is actually derivative of our word mandate or command. At some point in my life, I came to the conclusion that Maundy Thursday is every bit as important as Palm Sunday, Good Friday or even Easter Sunday for that matter. Indeed, the lessons of each are essential to a life of faithful discipleship. We understand well the life changing significance of those other events; the triumphal entry and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, but what then we ask is the essential provided by Maundy Thursday? That word “Maundy” or command specifically references a moment Jesus shared with the twelve on the eve of His crucifixion.   It was a special moment, a brief moment nestled between the crowds who sang “Hosanna!” just days before, and the masses of people who shouted “Crucify!” the day following. I. Indeed, this was a very different moment. Jesus takes this one last opportunity away from the crowds and the people and the noise to eat with his cl