Sermons
Job
What, you may be wondering, does Job, sitting in his large home with his devout prayers while God and the Adversary argue, have to with wilderness? Throughout this series, we have lodged ourselves mostly in the wilderness. We have been to the desert, the river banks, the mountains, the forest. Read more…
Sermons
A Day on Bierstadt Wilderness
David Klaassen | Shalom Community Church | March 14, 2021 Anita and I have the wonderful opportunity of being able to spend time frequently in the house that she and Galen built in Breckenridge, Colorado about 20 years ago. We spent six weeks there last summer, long enough to do Read more…
Sermons
A Day in the Wilderness
Nelson Shantz, Lent 2021 When our nest was empty, I began to join Ruth on some business trips–business for her, fun for me. One of these trips took us to Las Vegas, me for the first time. Ruth has some history with the city but that’s another story! Her conference Read more…
Sermons
Wrestling the Angel Thirteen Ways
21 So Jacob sent the gifts [to his brother Esau] ahead of him, but he spent that night in the camp. 22 Jacob got up during the night, took his two wives, his two women servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed the Jabbok River’s shallow water. 23 He took them and Read more…
Sermons
On Reconciling
Michelle Webster-Hein It is February, and everything is frozen, and all of our forays into homesteading have screeched to a halt. The sheep fencing sags at the last attempted corner. The little barn stands, still roofless, filling up with snow. The rabbit trench has toughened to a rigid scar. The Read more…
Sermons
God’s Demand for Reconciliation
These are intense and anxious times and we long for a sense of family and communal healing and cohesion. We struggle to know where, and how, to bring some sanity into our many broken relationships. A story is told about two warring congregations that were once were one. An intense Read more…
Repair
A Reparative Act
(Note: The audio version of this sermon includes sharing from the Dear White Christians book group: Ruth Shantz, Shelly Weaverdyck, Max Eckard, Laura Brubacher and Terri Friedline). There are many beginnings to this sermon, but no endings. Perhaps much of the Christian life is like this. We come into our Read more…
Sermons
Reconciliation and the Unreconcilable
God reconciles all things. That is our vision of the how the world goes, in a nutshell. But there are some things that are irreconcilable. Each of us could make our own list: murder, rape, abuse of children, dipping French fries in mayonnaise. There is a definitive category of actions Read more…