03.30.25 • Famous Last Words: Here is your Son, here is your Mother • John 19:25-27
Release Date: 04/01/2025
08.10.25 • John 14:23-29 • Thoughts on Resilience and Hope
Santa Monica Nazarene Church
In this sermon we talk hope in relation to our culture of fear.
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08.03.25 • Thoughts on Hope and Resilience • John 3:17-21
Santa Monica Nazarene Church
In this sermon we consider what hope and judgment have to do with each other. We look at the line from the Apostle's Creed, that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. With a little help from C.S. Lewis’s book The Great Divorce, we reflect on God’s love as something that can feel like heaven or hell, depending on how you receive it.
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07.27.25 • Thoughts on Resilience and Hope • 2 Corinthians 1:3-7
Santa Monica Nazarene Church
In this sermon we talk a little more about hope and pain, particularly how our cries against pain and suffering is an act of rebellion that God welcomes. It is to say that these are not things God desires. We look at Psalm 130, Job, Paul and Ivan Karamazov in order to understand what it means to find comfort in Christ and to be a comfort for others.
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07.20.25 • Thoughts on Resilience and Hope: the one about evil and suffering • Romans 8:18-25
Santa Monica Nazarene Church
In this sermon we look at hope in relation to the problem of evil and suffering. This is one of the biggest hangups when it comes to belief in God. We talk about how a proper understanding of God in relation to creation helps us understand why evil and suffering can exist in the first place and why we can still call God good.
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07.13.25 • Thoughts on Resilience and Hope • Hebrews 10:19-25
Santa Monica Nazarene Church
In this sermon we talk about hope by asking the question of which direction you are looking. Are you looking backwards in hopes of returning to a lost perfection or forwards in hopes of becoming what God made us for? We talk about hope in action (stories about Eusebius, Saint Francis, and Maximillian Kolbe) as we await the coming day of the Lord.
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07.06.25 • Thoughts on Resilience and Hope • Various Scriptures
Santa Monica Nazarene Church
In this sermon we continue our series on resilience and hope by looking at how it is our hope that is resilience even if we ourselves are not. We talk about what people say about resilience, what difference the gospel makes as to how we understand it, how hope and resilience mean we do not have to get out of life alive, and The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity as exemplary of resilience and hope.
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SaMoNaz weekly email audio for Sunday 07.06.25
Santa Monica Nazarene Church
Hi, Church - So, there’s this thing that happens to churches these days where we are tempted to respond to decline by chasing relevance. These words, of course, need some definition. Decline, we might say, is what we are tempted to feel when congregations shrink in size, when finances get tight, and when buildings decay. It’s a sense of stagnation. Relevance, we might say, is what we are tempted to chase in response to decline through things like a hyper-exertion of energy to grow in numbers, and raising money, and updating the property. A sense of bustling makes...
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06.29.25 • Thoughts on Resilience and Hope • Colossians 2:6-7 and Jeremiah 17:7-8
Santa Monica Nazarene Church
In this sermon we talk about resilience, hope, abiding as a long obedience, the formation of Yosemite, Michelangelo’s David, how a Steinway Piano is made, and what happens when we stay put with God in the life of prayer.
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06.22.25 • Thoughts on Resilience and Hope • Colossians 1:3-6
Santa Monica Nazarene Church
In this sermon we continue the series we started last week on hope and resilience. Here we talk about bad ways of thinking about hope, what the first century Greco-Roman world thought about hope, what pie and ice cream has to do withg the hope reserved for us in heaven, and of course The Shawshank Redemption.
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06.15.25 • What Makes You Come Alive: Resilience and Hope • 2 Corinthians 4.7-18
Santa Monica Nazarene Church
In this sermon we end our series inspired by a book called What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk With Howard Thurman by Lerita Coleman Brown. We use Thurman’s famous quote to jumpstart our reflections on what it means to live in the spirit of the resurrection. [The quote: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.”] In this sermon we talk about resilience and hope. These will also be the themes of our new series that we're kind of starting this week as well.
info_outlineIn this sermon we continue our series looking at the seven things Jesus says from the cross before he dies. We consider the person of Mary in John’s gospel, what she has to do with Eve and Abraham, and how she is always reminding us to do whatever the crucified one tells us to do.