What Is Your Life Trying to Tell You? Samuel, a voice in the night, and four ways to listen

Your life speaks through your reactions, your instincts, your body, the things you keep returning to, and even your failures. Learning to hear it is one of the ways we listen for the God who made each of us in a particular way.

This sermon follows the boy Samuel, who heard his name called three times in the night and kept running to the wrong person, until the old priest Eli realized whose voice it was. Drawing on Parker Palmer, it names four ways to listen: be still, read your own responses, count the misses, and ask an Eli, someone who notices what you can’t see and hands it back without telling you who to be. When Samuel finally understood, he answered, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

1 Samuel 3:1-10. Week 2 of Listen to Your Life.

Whose Life Are You Living? Moses, a burning bush, and the life that isn’t yours

Always the strong one, the perfect one, the one keeping everyone safe. A life can drift away from us so quietly that nobody notices, including us. This sermon starts with the family in Encanto, then turns to Moses: a Hebrew raised in Pharaoh’s household, living a life that wasn’t quite his, until he stopped to look at a bush that would not burn. When he asked God, “Who am I?”, the answer was not a list of his qualifications. It was “I will be with you.”

And the call was never only about Moses. The real you is not a private luxury; the people around you need it too.

Exodus 3:1-14. Week 1 of Listen to Your Life.

Who Are the Donkeys in Your Life: hearing God from the voices we overlook

God tells Balaam to go, and one verse later God is angry that he went. The contradiction is real, and someone could have smoothed it over centuries ago. Nobody did. A sermon on a famous foreign seer, a donkey who sees what he can't, and a Bible that kept its own arguments.

Numbers 22:21-35.

You Are Not Your GPA: what your worth was never actually based on

You have a running tally in your head: what you got right, what you did not, and how it compares to everyone else's. Most of us assume the failures are the part that hurts. This is a sermon about the brother who never left, did everything right, and still ended up standing outside the party.

Luke 15:11-32. Last in the series You Are Here. Preached by Pastor Shawn Coons.

One Thing at a Time

Your attention gets pulled in a dozen directions before breakfast. A woman named Martha felt it too, too much to do, and her sister just sitting there instead of helping. Jesus does not hand her a better system. He tells her only one thing is actually needed.

Luke 10:38-42. Third in the series You Are Here. Preached by Pastor Shawn Coons.

Where Are My People?

You can be lonely in a room full of people. A woman in Mark's gospel spent twelve years learning how to be invisible, and when she finally reached for Jesus she was hoping to get what she needed without being noticed. He stopped everything to find her anyway.

Mark 5:24-34. Second in the series You Are Here. Preached by Pastor Shawn Coons.

Ready or Not: what to do when you're not ready and it's starting anyway

Waiting to feel ready may be a trap, because the feeling of readiness doesn’t always come. This one starts with Jeremiah telling God he is not qualified for what he is being asked to do, and with God's answer, which is not "yes you are," but "go anyway, I am coming with you."

Jeremiah 1:4-10. First in the series You Are Here. Preached by Pastor Shawn Coons.

Courage in the Chaos - Esther's Story

What do we do when our fear isn't irrational - when it's based on real threats to our communities? Drawing from Esther's story and featuring insights from W. Kamau Bell's recent show at the Kennedy Center, this sermon explores how to move forward when the stakes are life-and-death.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the choice to act despite it. From Frodo's conversation with Gandalf to Esther's "if I perish, I perish," discover how sacred stories and modern examples show us how to: -Name our fears honestly
-Find our unique "lane" of influence
-Support each other in scary times
-Move forward even while trembling

This is for anyone feeling powerless in the face of systemic threats to their community.

Before the Bible Was the Bible - Week 5

What if the Bible wasn't finished? What if we were still adding books today? In this final installment of our series, we explore how the Bible actually came together - not through secret meetings or papal decrees, but through communities discovering which texts truly spoke God's truth to their lives.

From Marcion's edited Bible to Thomas Jefferson's cut-and-paste version, we examine how people have tried to shape scripture to their preferences. But the real story is more fascinating: how early Christian communities organically recognized which writings carried divine authority, and how even their blind spots (like patriarchy) affected what was included.

Before the Bible Was the Bible - Week 4

What do you do when the Bible doesn't directly address modern issues like social media, AI, or gender identity? In this sermon, we explore how the early church - particularly Paul - tackled their own "new" questions that Jesus never addressed. Through examining Paul's creative problem-solving (think spiritual MacGyver!), and his own cultural biases, we discover a model for faithfully addressing contemporary challenges while staying true to Jesus' core message.