Tag Archives: Transformation

SERMON: The Crowd is Wild (Guest Speaker Zach Dubord)

Zach Dubord shared a sermon that aligned with some of the major issues and concerns of our time.

Here’s the start of the sermon, and you can listen to the full sermon just below, or download the full sermon (PDF) to read.

“Our Gospel today comes from Luke 19:1-10 which is on page 63 of your pew Bible. It is yet another story involving Jesus and a tax man.

He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way.

The Conversion of Zacchaeus, Bernardo Strozzi (1581 – 1644). {{US-PD}} Wikimedia.

When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.”

So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”

Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

The Word of the Lord.

Let me tell you a true story. There was an influential man who rose to power during a time of great political division. He was the second of twelve children and grew up in a two-bedroom house with one bathroom He began working in the family business at 8 years old, and was the first person in his family to go to college.”

Find the PDF download below to read, or listen to the full sermon here.

Visit Zach’s Soundcloud for this sermon, or his recent “No Fun Allowed?” FCC sermon.

Prefer to read it? Download the PDF here.

Featured image credit: Zacchaeus by Niels Larsen Stevns. Jesus calls Zacchaeus down from his height in the tree. {{PD-US}} Wikimedia.

SERMON: The Good Book (Part 7): Fields and Meadows.

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
Preached on Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018

April First Is Fool’s Day, and We Have Butterflies and Moths
 on the Communion Table.

We did The Good Book (Part 1): Enlightening the Eyes (a.k.a. Bible 101). Then came a sermon on A Hard Conversation: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Part 2, the Bible and Women in Part 3, the Bible and Homosexuality in Part 4; the Bible and Money in Part 5; and Core Principles of the Bible (Part 6).

Today is a rare day, when both Easter and April Fool’s Day coincide. The last time this happened was in 1956, 62 years ago, and the next one isn’t that far away, in 2029.

Considering the rarity of this coincidence, there are probably tens of thousands of sermons right now about the apparent vacuity of Paul’s Gospel admonition to be fools for Christ, but I’m going to pass on that temptation.

However, our Christian Education Committee has asked me to incorporate the theme of butterflies into the Easter sermon for today.

I’m happy to oblige on one condition, that it will cover both butterflies and moths. The committee undertook my plaintive request after lengthy debate and condescended to my petition upon a close vote.

On the communion table, we have the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies and Moths, and we have a fantastic coffee-table book called Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species by Edward O. Wilson, with marvelous pictures.

There’s an old photograph of a butterfly 
that I’ll mention later, and the television is cycling fifty-some photos of butterflies that Bernie Lewis has taken over the years.

There’s also what’s called a pysanky, the Ukranian Easter egg with the butterfly theme on it that my wife Tracy did.

To top off the display, in the cases on the piano and also on the communion table are butterflies that were provided by the Price family. So thank you all.

Let me begin with a short poem by Robert Graves, called Flying Crooked:

The butterfly, the Cabbage White,


(His honest idiocy of flight)


Will never now, it is too late,


Master the art of flying 
 straight,

Yet has – who knows so well as I?

A just sense of how not to fly:


He lurches here and here by 
 guess


And God and hope and hopelessness.


Even the aerobatic Swift


Has not his flying-crooked gift.

A Sphinx Moth feeds on a
Trumpet; a Beautiful Blue 
Morpho Saves an Ill Child.

Sphinx Moth on a Honeysuckle Trumpet Vine. Courtesy of UKNTrees.

We have all been entranced by the wonder and beauty and delight of butterflies throughout our days.

Perhaps we had a butterfly net as a kid and a meadow to play in, or perhaps we’ve been to the state fair or the Museum of Natural History and have seen the displays of serious collectors.

Or maybe we’ve been sitting in our backyard on a sunny afternoon, and a butterfly alights upon a sleeping dog or baby or flower, demanding our attention and lightening our souls.

It need not be a sunny afternoon. One rather late August night, well after 11:00 p.m., I was sitting in my backyard, having a glass of wine and taking in the night air.

I happened to be sitting next to a trumpet vine, thinking little enough, when suddenly a Sphinx moth, almost indistinguishable in size and flight from a hummingbird, began its nocturnal feeding on those beautiful flowers.

The large moth hovered only a foot or so from my head as I sat still and quiet. I was transfixed by the moment — the rarity of such an encounter; the brrrrrrrrr of the wings right by my ear; the exquisiteness of this little creature of nature, dimly visible in the dark.

Some of you might have seen The Blue Butterfly (2004). This marvelous movie tells the true story of a terminally ill ten-year-old Canadian boy whose dream is to catch the most beautiful butterfly on earth, the mythic and elusive Blue Morpho.

His mother, single and frazzled, but determined to grant this last wish of her only child, persuades a renowned entomologist (played by William Hurt) to take them on a trip to the jungles of Costa Rica to search for the butterfly, leading to an adventure that will transform their lives.

I won’t spoil the ending for you but will say only that you will have a tear of joy in your eye.

[Read this omitted section in the full sermon]

Butterflies (and moths to a lesser extent) have been a classic Easter symbol going all the way back.

The way the classic version of it goes is that the caterpillar stage represents our regular human life, and then the cocoon or the chrysalis stage represents our death, reminiscent even of the shroud, the linen cloths wrapped around Jesus’ body.

Finally, after death our soul or spirit emerges into the heavenly realm, the angelic realm, no longer encumbered by physicality, and that is the butterfly stage.

The Caterpillar Doesn’t Die, It
 Metamorphoses; Follows Death
 by Resurrection as a Butterfly.

Monarch Caterpillar Becoming a Chrysalis, courtesy of Monarch-Butterfly dot com.

As far as metaphors or analogies go, this isn’t the best of them. For one thing, it’s a bit negative to liken our human experience to that of a worm. I know some people who feel that way. They are glass-half-empty people, but it strikes me as a bit harsh.

However, the caterpillar doesn’t really die but rather changes, called metamorphosis (a Latin word meaning to change from). In any case, really dying is an important part of the Easter message.

This reminds me of an Easter sermon I heard years ago, perhaps memorable because the preacher did not know the difference between two key words — “resurrection” and “resuscitation.”

So he preached an entire sermon about Jesus being resuscitated. “Come on, Jesus, you can make it.” This definitely made the sermon unforgettable.

Despite the butterfly metamorphosis analogy having some weaknesses, the analogy is actually receiving better science that has been discovered of late.

See how the rest of the story unfolds and wraps up…

Download or view the full Good Book (Part 7): Fields and Meadows sermon.

Featured Image Credit: Monarch in the Meadow. Photo by Brett Billings, PD via Pixnio.