Sunday sermons from Forest Hills Mennonite Church

"We declare to you what was from the beginning... concerning the word of life." These words penned by "The Elder" in the prologue of 1 John set the stage for a letter addressing a maturing Christian community, inspiring them to faithfulness and fellowship in Christ, who is eternal life.

Jesus' parable about a man who had two sons is one of the most famous and familiar stories in Western literature. Where do we find ourselves in it? 

For a lot of people, June is lost and found season—the time when schools and clubs and teams and choirs set out all the things kids have lost over the past year and try to return them to their owners. In Luke 15, Jesus tells three stories about lostness and foundness, challenging us to rethink the very concepts themselves. 

Karyn Nancarvis, a chaplain at Garden Spot Village, reflects on the significance of God's faithfulness over time. 

Our culture's command to "never forget" carries a sense of fraught, almost religious, obligation, as if salvation is found in memory alone. How do followers of Jesus respond, particularly when this fixation on the past seems to drive future conflict, violence, and suffering?

Jesus' response to a violent and untruthful world is to send His followers out like sheep in the midst of wolves, inviting them to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. How do we live in this paradox in the midst of our culture's epistemic crisis? 

Some of the very same leaders who were so adamant in their defense of the idea of "absolute truth" a few decades ago seem to now quite comfortably embrace "alternative facts." How do followers of Jesus see to it that no one takes us captive through philosophy, but that we allow the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth? 

Is it fair to say that humanity is facing a knowledge crisis (or "epistemic crisis") today? A range of books and articles are exploring the question from contemporary perspectives, but what can followers of Jesus learn by engaging the wisdom of Scripture?

Why do Christians seem to be overrepresented in cult-like movements and conspiratorial thinking? As people who follow Jesus, how do we orient ourselves toward Jesus' truth?

About 2/3 of the Psalms could be categorized as lament—pleas for God to rescue or questions in the aftermath of catastrophe. When we experience grief, we often wonder why God doesn't answer us... but maybe that's because we haven't heard God calling out to us through Jesus. 

Many of us carry around a linear model of grief, where we seamlessly progress from one stage to the next (from denial to anger to bargaining to depression and finally acceptance). But grief doesn't usually work that way. Instead, it's a liminal experience. When we're in the in-between of grief, there are a few dangers to watch out for. 

Jesus' temptation in the wilderness is almost the definition of a "liminal" experience: He enters as a seemingly unassuming carpenter but emerges as God's anointed one. What happens in the in-between? 

The early church continually made an audacious claim: that Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter executed on a Roman cross, was presently ruling and reigning over the entire cosmos. Does this declaration that "Jesus is Lord" have any meaning for us today? 

What do we do we find ourselves in a season of disorientation, between what was and what will be?

The Eucharist (or communion) is a central act that both creates and recognizes the Body of Christ. How do we discern Christ's body as we partake of it?

One of the ways the church recognizes the communal nature of our existence is through membership. But membership in the modern era sometimes seems far removed from the New Testament pattern. How do we live faithfully in that gap?

What makes you... you? The dominant cultural understanding (at least in the West) is that our essential self is located deep within us. The Biblical understanding, though, is that we were created by, in, and for relationship. In the words of South African leader Desmond Tutu, "A person is a person through other persons." 

Christians throughout history have recognized that God must deal with Sin in an ultimate and final sense... but what does that look like? And does it matter?

If the idea of "sin" pops up in unexpected places, maybe it's worth stepping back and asking... what do we mean when we talk about "sin"?

From Friedrich Nietzsche to Fatboy Slim, the cultural understandings of "guilt" and "sin" have followed an unexpected trajectory—and the Christian story offers hope in surprising ways. 

Fullness of God in helpless babe: a profound contrast with other would-be saviors of the day. 

How does Jesus choose to spend his one irreplaceable, vulnerable human existence? Generously.

Jesus enters into the fullness of human experience, which means that he experiences grief. Even the prophet Isaiah recognized that God's anointed one would be a person of sorrows, acquainted with grief. 

God chooses to enter human existence in the most vulnerable state possible: a newborn child. Perhaps vulnerability isn't something to be avoided (or even a superpower to be sought after), but one part of being human that draws us into connection with God. 

The early church leader Athanasius famously wrote that "God became man in order that humans might become god." The revolution of the incarnation (literally "God in meat form") radically reshapes our experience of being human and our relationship with our own body. 

Folks born between 1928 and 1945 are sometimes called "Builders," "Traditionalists," or the "Silent Generation." Is it true that the more things change, the more they stay the same? Or is it true that the past if a foreign country: they do things differently there? Perhaps by embracing both of these paradoxical truths, we can better understand how God turns the hearts of parents to children and the hearts of children to parents. 

Baby Boomers: The OGs of conversations about generational differences. How did this generation go from being the generation that would "write finis to poverty and war (Time Magazine, 1966) to "The Generation that Broke America" (Time Magazine, 2018)? And what does the Boomer experience of high expectations—and sometimes disappointing outcomes—mean for the church? 

The generation of people most likely to say "There's nothing special about my generation." Perhaps it's no wonder they earned the moniker "Generation X." Yet this generation—raised when everyone seemed to think the world was about to end—has carried on in remarkable ways, even when sandwiched between the demands of their aging parents and seemingly perpetually adolescent children. Perhaps the wisdom of the early church has particular relevance for people who realize the "end" might never come. 

Millennials often get a bad rap—from cracks about participation trophies to critiques about self-absorptions to accusations that they've destroyed entire industries. But as Bob Yoder's work has shown, Millennials still have a keen interest in faith and want to experience genuine connections within Christian community. 

If when we're born shapes who we are, how does Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012ish) experience life and faith? Can the church listen with care and compassion to the most highly networked generation in human history? 

Ephesians 5:21-33 presents a "great mystery"—a conversation about men and women, relationships and marriage, submission and love. Maybe this mystery fits right into the entire point of the Book of Ephesians: God bringing all things to unity through Christ. 

As the fifth chapter of Ephesians unfolds, the author continues exploring a series of dualities, placing intense emphasis on sexual immorality and greed (which is idolatry). Does this antiquated text have anything to teach us about our lives today? 

Halfway through the forth chapter of Ephesians, things take a turn: the epistle of unity becomes obsessed with duality, separating this from that, us from them. How do we live faithfully under God's authority exercised through this seemingly contradictory part of Scripture?

Vojta shares reflections from the Gospel of John about how we internalize beliefs about ourselves and how God can reveal deeper truths to us. 

At Christ's resurrection, God gives leaderships to the church so that all the members may be equipped for ministry and grow together into maturity. 

Why do we pray? In the third chapter of Ephesians, the author offers a powerful prayer on behalf of the recipients, and perhaps also offers a model for our own lives of prayer. Pastor Jon explores these themes in a sermon from our annual Service in the Park. 

If God is all-powerful and all-loving, working to bring all things to unity in Christ Jesus through the church... why is everything such a mess? 

Why did Jesus die? While many of us have an easy answer at the ready, the Book of Ephesians challenges us to expand our thinking and maybe even discover something unexpected. 

Ephesians 2 draws us into some of the thorniest debates in the history of Christian faith: what's the relationship between God's sovereignty and human agency, and how to grace and works fit together for salvation? 

How do we know what we know? Do we have any reliable criteria for agreeing about what we can know to be true? At several points in the Book of Ephesians, Paul (or someone writing in Paul's name) invites us to know things that are beyond knowledge... which seems to complicate things a little bit. 

“If the Reformers had taken Ephesians rather than Galatians and Romans as their main set texts, the entire course of Western history might have been different.” - N. T. Wright What gives the epistle to the Ephesians such power? One clue is found in Eph. 1:9-10, which describes God's ultimate plan for the entire universe, as Christ "recapitulates" all things, bringing unity to things in heaven and things on earth within himself. 

What do we do when we feel like we don't belong? Drawing from Romans 15, we're exploring alienation and belonging, asking how it can be possible to accept one another just as Christ has accepted us.

Guilt gets a bad rap but still manages to show up everywhere from debates about "critical race theory" to sitcoms like 30 Rock. Can the Psalms help us make sense of our guilt? 

Is joy something that happens to us, or something we can choose?

Throughout Scripture, the people of God are repeatedly encouraged to "Fear not!" If fear is part of our emotional makeup, how does this exhortation make sense?

Anger is one way our bodies and our brains tell us that something is standing between us and our goals. How should we respond when we feel angry? 

Emotions are an integral part of what it means to be human—complex creatures made in the likeness and image of God. Through the rich poetry of the Psalms, we discover the power of bringing our full selves before God and not shying away from our own emotions.

What difference does it make if we approach Jesus by way of Paul or by way of Moses? Pastor Jon explores the Exodus story as a way to understand salvation as liberation. 

"African Americans' respect for the authority of the Christian Scriptures is a miracle in itself." That's how professors Emerson B. Powery and Rodney S. Sadler, Jr. begin their exploration of enslaved and formerly enslaved people's engagement with the Bible during the pre-war period. What can their example teach people today about the faithfulness of God?

Have you ever noticed just how weird the Bible is? What if the unsettling nature of the Bible isn't a problem to be solved but a gift to be embraced? Perhaps something fruitful can emerge from a honest engagement with how unsettling we find the Bible.

From the Friday after Thanksgiving through December 26, tradition takes on an authority we never grant it the other eleven months of the year. Is it possible that tradition—far from being a constricting burden—is a liberating gift?