Sermons

Charge to Deacons Bob Stillerman Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost, 8/23/2026 Matthew 16:13-20 Bulletin | 2026 Deacon Installation Insert | Charge to Deacons Today, we have the great privilege to ordain Rev. Becky Albritton into deacon ministry, and to install Ron Alford, Ellen Hinton, Cher Moss, and Jane Pearce as collaborators in the journey. Now it […]

Long ago, a faithful woman insisted that God was big enough and bold enough to heal the world, her neighborhood included. And so she persisted.  May God give us the courage to do the same. 

Jesus meets us in the wilderness.  Jesus walks toward us, right over choppy waters, to join us in the storm. Jesus offers a hand, even rescues us from drowning. Jesus offers the same love and consistency to the doubters, and the worriers, and the grumblers as he does to the confident, and the faithful, and the content.

God has always, and will always, provide us with enough. We don’t need to read today’s text to know that truth. But today’s text reminds us that it’s not Caesar who originates nor facilitates the resources to meet our needs. It’s God. And God alone. That means the world we must strive for, the world we can live into, is steeped in cooperation: the acknowledgement that ours is a world where God’s people and God’s lands operate in accordance with God’s good nature and God’s good character. God empowers us to feed one another; God invites us to be full rather than stuffed; God transforms the ordinary and the meager into the extraordinary and the abundant.

This is what Jesus is telling us this morning, Millbrook. You, me, we, all of us, are loved beyond measure, held in the hands of an affectionate Creator, who yearns for our potential to burst forward, who delights in our presence, who says to themselves each and every moment, “I’m so glad I made you!” And while there a thousand adjectives I could use to describe the people who sit in this room, I hope you’ll leave here remembering a noun, a word of unchanging distinction: Beloved. YOU, ME, WE, ALL ARE GOD’S BELOVED.  Thanks be to God!!!

For when we experience God’s hospitality, we begin to realize our collective gifts, and our collective possibilities.  And God is no longer the obstacle to those goals, but rather God is the catalyst.  I believe, with all my heart, that worship is the beginning of transformation.  It is not idleness. It is not meaningless. It Is our purpose and our source and our start.