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Rian Adams
Everyone’s Invited To The Wedding Reception If you’ve lived through a wedding you know are stressful. What few people realize is how stressful weddings are for the clergy. Although we will never say it with parishioners around, when clergy get together, we inevitably share horror stories and express disdain for weddings. I’ve experienced that firsthand when a wedding goes wrong. When I say wrong, I really it was a disaster before it began. The mother of the bride, bless her heart, deserved her own T.V. show on T.L.C. She was a Baptist…
Sermon: Compassion Changes Conditions Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost, posted by Rian Adams I cried when I read the hunchback of Notre Dame. Victor Hugo’s novel is a masterpiece that stays with you your whole life because we see pieces of each character in ourselves. In the beginning, we meet Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame. It is the Festival of Fools in Paris. The crowds elected him the “Pope of Fools” because he was the ugliest person in Paris. They heaved him on a throne and paraded him through the city streets as the crowds mocked him. Then…
The Blessing of Hardships. Sermon 10th Sunday After Pentecost Intro: Since this Gospel reading is intense, I thought I’d begin by admitting something kind of funny about it. When I read it this week, I pictured Jesus at a Charlie Daniels concert singing, “Fire on the mountain run boys run.” It also made me wonder, “… how am I supposed to preach this?” It speaks of fire consuming the earth, and about teenagers hating their parents. Well, maybe that one’s not a stretch. But I’d rather preach about the prince of peace than a man who…
Overcoming Fear: Sermon for The Ninth Sunday After Pentecost Overcoming Our Fears and Anxieties Back when Dolly Parton toured, she said that she slept with her makeup on. A reporter from the New York times asked her why, and she said, “You never know if you’re going to wreck the bus, you never know if you’re going to be somewhere in a hotel and there’s going to be a fire. So I leave my makeup on at night and clean my face in the morning to reapply.” It’s okay; you can go ahead and…
What Will You Do if You Win the Lottery? The Gospel lesson this morning is about greed, which is not the easiest subject to preach. Especially when we’re going to ask for your money when the offering plate comes around in a few mins. I noticed something about greed, it is almost like a fog. Fog is dangerous; it distorts vision and easily confuses us. I experienced the confusion of fog one morning in the Hollywood Hills… I couldn’t see where to go. It was so thick even the GPS was lost too. Every morning in…
Paris… sigh. I’ve been flirting with this blog post for weeks. I hesitated to write it because I wanted to adequately describe the experiences. Then I realized blog posts are never really finished… Last spring, my wife and I visited Paris. The culture there is unlike any city I’ve visited: Creme Brule, croissants, and espresso shots in the afternoons were blissful. I had the best sleep of my life in a quiet hotel that, two hundred years before, served as a convent for Catholic sisters. Fourteen hours… if you wondered. Of course…