27
September
2007
Sermon for the Mt. Hollywood Congregational Church, September 23, 2007 – Peter Laarman
Jeremiah 8.18-9.1; Luke 16.1-13
Preachers from time immemorial have wanted to get the attention of their listeners by painting a grim picture of a world that is perishing. What I want to observe here this morning is that, while once such characterizations of chaos and catastrophe could be dismissed a cheap rhetorical flourishes, today we are looking at a world that is quite literally perishing—what with the arctic ice cap now looking like miscellaneous small cubes in the bottom of a cocktail glass, with the imminent threat of massive species loss, and with strange new plagues and viruses related to global warming beginning to pop up alarmingly all over the place. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Happening in the World
12
September
2007
A Sermon from Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
September 11, 2007
Romans 8:29-39, Psalm 23, John 5:1b-9
It could have been any of a dozen Tuesday mornings. The alarm had sounded and I had shut it off and gone back to bed. I lay there waiting until I worked up the fortitude to actually pull myself out of the sack. As I pondered the tasks that lay ahead the phone rang. Sleepily, I stumbled over to it, almost dropping it, and attempted to sound bright and chipper as if I were already on my third cup of coffee, and had been an hour or so into the day’s activities (who was I kidding?).
“Dad,” the urgent voice almost shouted. “Do you have the TV on? You’ve gotta turn the TV on. A hijacked plane just flew into the World Trade Tower. Turn it on! Gotta go to class now. Bye.” And Jonathan was gone.
I rushed over and turned on the TV. The camera remained focused on the smoking tower, the announcer’s voice droning on and on.
I was frozen to the picture. I didn’t know what to think. My mind was still numb as a second plane flew into the other tower. And then that sickening scene of collapse and choking dust billowing up everywhere as the terrified crowd burst headlong running from what looked to be a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.
I just sat before the TV in a stupor, with an empty feeling for the rest of the day - hollowed out.
Now, as I re-read the tales of survivors and others who were witnesses that day, as I am inexorably drawn toward those memories of collapsing buildings and choking dust, I find myself experiencing once again the same numbness, the same sense of loss, the same dread. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Happening in the World
2
September
2007
There he was, much too pale and chubby to pass as an old salt but nonetheless perched proudly in the bow of his Newport yacht, the aptly-named Numbers: one Daniel M. Meyers, a founder of First Marblehead, one of the leading players in the $20 billion student loan industry.
And why would I begin a Labor Day rant with this image from the Sunday New York Times business section? Because the piece reports casually, in the context of charting the spectacular profits of companies like Meyers’, that the average debt level carried by newly-minted college graduates has more than doubled over the past decade. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
