Sermons

Margreta Silverstone

November 10, 2024

Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost

On this post-election Sunday, with preliminary results in and candidates already conceding the race, I intend to give us all time to hear each other. We have been doing that already, some of us, via the emails that have been sent out on the Seekers email communication channel. I have been appreciative of the ping of new mail from another Seeker with a poem or prayer or recording, but it is not the same as being in person together.

Marjory Zoet Bankson

November 3, 2024

Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Text: John 11:32-44

Today we celebrate all the saints who have gone before us – people who have shown us the way to live God’s intention for human life.

Although we may have grown up with a definition of what it means to be saintly as being exceptionally pious or bearing burdens without complaint, today we can broaden our definition of sainthood to include people who exemplified wholeness or completeness. In the class that John Morris and I led recently, we recognized that the root word for salvation is the Latin word salvus, which means wholeness or completeness. In other words, Saints are people who show us the way to new life. They are juicy! Compassionate! Connected to God’s evolving design for creation! As Howard Thurman says, they are people who are fully alive!

Peter Bankson

October 27, 2024

Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

INTRODUCTION

For many years in worship at Seekers Church we have designated the weeks between our annual recommitment and the beginning of Advent as our “jubilee” season, a time of celebration and restoration. We came to that image to acknowledge the time between recommitment and Advent. These weeks leading up to the observance of Thanksgiving, as a time of gratitude, rooted in traditions celebrating the harvest, the time to gather together what we will need to sustain us over the winter.

David W. Lloyd

October 20, 2024

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

Dearly beloved, I am speaking today to those of you who are going to make a commitment to Seekers Church for the first time. I hope the rest of you listen because everything I’ll say also pertains to you! Almost everyone who has worshipped here has commented that Seekers Church is different from other churches in which they’ve worshipped. Yes, and Recommitment Sunday is one such difference. Recommitment Sunday is a tradition from the Church of the Saviour that Seekers Church has faithfully kept since our founding fifty years ago as one of the Church of the Saviour sister communities. Of the Sundays that require each Seeker to prepare for, Recommitment Sunday has always been third, behind Easter and Christmas. It is always observed on the third Sunday of October, the day on which the Church of the Saviour was founded in 1947.

John Morris

October 13, 2024

Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

Henry James, commenting on writing fiction, warned, “Tell a dream, lose a reader.”  This is good advice for talking about dreams too: You really shouldn’t assume other people will find your dreams as fascinating and pregnant with meaning as you do.

          Nevertheless, I’m going to start this sermon with the unpromising topic sentence:

          Let me tell you about a dream I had a few nights ago.