The Commons
A preaching blog with ideas and for interactive story sermon writing and image exegesis by Len Sweet.
Here, you can comment on any post to discuss its meaning and share your thoughts.
Mysterious and Terrible
Fyodor” Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov that beauty is “mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man [humanity].” The preacher doesn’t just visit that “battlefield” and report periodically from the front lines. The preacher walks the via…
The Pageant, A Christmas Poem
[Ed. note—Jaime was a close friend and colleague who served in the Western Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church. She died tragically last year, and this Christmas poem was one of the last things she sent me. I don’t know when she wrote it, but I send it to…
Christmas Day Greeting for you to use
“There can be no sadness when life is being born.” St. Leo the Great (400-461). Happy Birthday, Jesus.
Ladder or Drill?
“Christmas does not give us a ladder to climb out of the human condition,” Avery Dulles wrote. “It gives us a drill to burrow into the heart of everything that is, and there, find it already shimmering with divinity.” At Advent, flesh is enspirited and spirit is enfleshed.
Don’t Forget The Flea
“This story my own father told me years ago from his own experience as a teacher. It was near Christmas time and, as classes often do at that time of the year, various projects were being done relating to Christmas. My father was headmaster and went to visit a primary…
Know Him, Love Him
A little boy’s father had been killed in the Iraq War before the boy had ever known him. All he had was a picture of his father, which was placed on an end table in the living room right under the light. One day he said to his mother: “I…
The Everlasting Arms
The same God who says “I will carry you; And I will bear you and I will deliver you” (Isaiah 48:4); the same God who promises to be our “dwelling place, And underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deuteronomy 33:27) so we can sing “Leaning, Leaning, Leaning on the Everlasting Arms;”…
3-Fold Conviction
Christmas involves a three-fold conviction of faith: Jesus has come, born to a humble couple in the village of Bethlehem, during the reign of Caesar Augustus: Jesus comes now, saying “Follow me.. . . Love one another.” Jesus comes again in glory at the end of history . .. When…
Christmas and New Year
Why is it people want a Christmas they’ll never forget and a New Year’s they’ll never remember?
A Little Bit of Scrooge
To prove there is a little of “Scrooge” in all of us, here is some of Charles Dickens’ earliest writing, in the form of a letter to the editor of the Athenaeum on 07 January 1932. Dickens was obviously fed up with the cold and snow: Perhaps, somebody will…