e at Ebenezer believe in the one true God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit (the Holy Trinity). We believe that Jesus Christ is true God and true man, the Son of God and the Savior of the world. We believe that Jesus is the Lord whom we serve in our everyday lives. We believe in the centrality of worship, Word and Sacrament. We believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.
These following sermons are done by Pastor Joshua Haugen at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Greensboro, NC. They are works in progress and they are the actual manuscripts for Sunday Morning Worship; hence, they are not written for grammatical accuracy. Please enjoy them in the Spirit in which they were written. They are currently only added to the website according to request. If you have any questions or comments please contact the church office at 336-272-5321. Thank you and blessings.
Holy Holy Holy
Sermon for Sunday February 7th, 2010
Sermon Theme: A Holy, Righteous, and Loving God
Sermon Text: Isaiah 6:1-8
Holy, Holy, Holy: Isaiah 6
What would you do if you saw
God face to face? When I say see God face to face I don't mean that we are
looking at a picture of Jesus patting the children on the head, which is pretty
common artwork that many of you might have in your own homes. I mean what would
you do if you saw God face to face with the gloves off. What would you do if
you walked into church just a few hours early or stayed after everyone had left
and right there, where that wooden cross is, it suddenly disappeared and in its
place you saw opened the very throne room of God. There in the middle sat the
Almighty in all of his Glory and He looked at you. What would you do?
The Gospel reading just doesn't seem right. After all the
last four Sundays of the church year haven't exactly been happy readings. We
have been talking about those who have suffered for their faith, those we passed
away in the faith, and we have been talking about Christ the King who comes at
the end of time. All these end time texts are about suffering, death and end of
the world.
And now finally we have turned the corner in the church
year. We have had thanksgiving and we all probably still feel rather full. The
stores are playing Christmas music, we went shopping on black Friday, Saturday,
and perhaps even today, and we are starting to actually believe Christmas is
just around the corner. And even the church year has gotten with the program. Finally
we have gotten through green with an occasional red and white and have moved
once and for all into blue, into Advent.
Then comes in this text, "And there will be signs in sun and
moon and stars and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the
roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and foreboding of
what is coming on the world."...
In the Gospel of Mark we deal with family, marriage, divorce, and children and many other things as well. I would like to offer a brief disclaimer about this text before I enter into it. I realize full well that I am not perfect and hence I do not always interpret scripture perfectly and I realize that this text affects all of us in fairly direct ways. And with this being said I will attempt to preach this text in a way that ultimately ends in Gospel but knowing full well that I will miss-speak somewhere. So let us listen together and hear the word of the Lord as He speaks to us even through a sinful pastor.
The Pharisees came up to Jesus and asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Sometimes in our reading of our text we fail to appreciate how loaded a question this was even for Jesus. We often think that Jesus was simply the Son of God and He had no verbal land mines to worry about. We think He just completely had everything under control up to and including His cross. In a way this is true.
But if we take a second to ponder this question from the perspective of the Pharisees then we see a very different situation. They were asking Him a question to trap Him or test Him. This was the perfect question to do it. We get this, because even today when we start talking about marriage and children and family we are dealing with very difficult issues.
Sermon Theme: Humility and the life of the Christian
James and Mark talk about a very similar topic.
They both talk about humility and the Christian.
Humility doesn’t necessarily come real easy for us people. On television after a sports game how many athletes have you ever seen hold up number two or number three or number 10. No, usually they all say we are number 1. In fact I along with many of you out there get quite agitated when my team or teams don’t do quite as well as I had hoped. The reason for that is quite simple. We want them to win. We don’t really want them to be all that humble. (Perhaps gracious in victory but we want them to be victors all the same)
So when Christ in the Gospel of Mark is talking about His coming death upon the cross we can sort of understand why the disciples might have been grieved and afraid of what He was saying. After all they wanted Jesus and themselves to win. They wanted to be number 1, but He kept on saying that he was going to die, be handed over into the hands of sinners, to be crucified.
Have you ever felt separated from someone? Have you felt cut off or excluded? Have you ever done the cutting off and the excluding? Have you ever felt like there was a wall of separation between you and someone else? I think we have all felt that wall of separation or been guilty of making a wall at some point in time in our life.
Today Christ talks about walls and what he thinks about them.
In the reading for Ephesians Paul is talking to us about one particular wall. The wall, which he is referring too, concerned the Jews and the Gentiles. To understand the separation that was between these folks we have to understand a few things about the Old Testament. First, we have to understand the tabernacle/temple.
“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:” (1 Peter 3:15) (Read by Max McLean. Provided by The Listener's Audio Bible.)
Sermons 
(Read by Max McLean. Provided by The Listener's Audio Bible.)