SaMoNaz weekly email audio for Sunday, 05.11.25
Release Date: 05/11/2025
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_outlineGood morning, Santa Monica Nazarene -
I’m here with another audio recording of my weekly Call to Worship email. And today I wanted to share a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien’s second book in The Lord of the Rings series (the book’s called The Two Towers, in case you were wondering). But it’s a quote I’ve been thinking about ever since I read it that I think might help us prepare our hearts for worship today.
To set the stage a little bit… at this point in the story, Sam and Frodo are reflecting on how far they’ve travelled in their journey to destroy the Ring of Power. (It’s okay if you don’t know what that means. Just know that that’s the main goal—destroying the ring of power—and that it requires a long and dangerous journey to do so.)
But there’s this moment when Sam starts reflecting on what it means to go on an adventure. And I love what he says. It’s kind of a long paragraph, but it’s really good. And so he says,
“And we should’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting, and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t . . .”
Sam is maturing a bit, here, in his thinking about what it means to go on an adventure. His younger mind saw adventure as something you pursued because life was boring. However, now he understands that adventure sometimes finds you all on its own and you have to then decide whether you’ll embrace it and go on the journey.
As I think about this quote, I like the idea that we are dropped into stories. That adventure finds us. That life finds us. And we have to decide whether to embrace it and to go on the journey. It makes me think about God and creation and what it means to be alive. That we are dropped into the story of God and that God is calling us onto a journey towards communion with him.
There’s always some mystery to the life of faith. We’re called to follow Jesus, but the details of that journey aren’t known to us. And we can always choose to turn back. Or we can be like Sam and Frodo and venture out further and come to discover more and more that the good tales never end, as they say, and that we actually want to be a part of them.
As you prepare your heart for worship, I pray you would know that when you woke up today you landed in the greatest of all stories and that it is calling to you.
See you at 10:30am for worship!
Grace and Peace,
Pastor Scott