Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 30th, 2008 No Comments »
Referencing the despair of God’s people as found in the Isaiah 64 narrative, Barbara Moyer Lehman, associate pastor at Park View Mennonite Church, Harrisonburg, VA, dramatized how distant God’s people felt from Him, how they felt “his face hidden from them.” In his anguish for a people feeling abandoned, Isaiah pleaded with God to “rip open the heavens and come down and act.” Likewise today, in all of our afflictions and discouragement, we call upon God to show himself, to rescue us in a time of trouble. “But we need to look for God’s face because we never know in what place, or in what person, he will come to us. Her sermon was the first in the Advent series “Let Your Face Shine.”
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Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 23rd, 2008 No Comments »
A world shaped by material scarcity needs people like us, Phil Kniss, lead pastor at Park View Mennonite Church, Harrisonburg, VA, said in his second sermon on “Trustees in God’s Kingdom.” Drawing on the words of Jesus in Matt. 6 on not worrying about life’s basics and what renowned Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann calls the “liturgy of abundance” and the “myth of scarcity,” Kniss described a God of abundant generosity, a giving God showering His abundance often to undeserving recipients, as contrasted to the influences of our culture which emphasizes scarcity to the point of hording for financial security and exploiting our uncertainties to the point of self preservation that ignores the needs around us.
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Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 16th, 2008 No Comments »
In his first of a two-sermon series on stewardship, Phil Kniss, lead pastor of the Park View Mennonite Church, said that in times of economic crisis like this, the naked truth about ourselves is revealed. “Suddenly the protected the grain in my private storehouse is concern is No. 1; everything else is secondary. It becomes clear if our hope, and our peace and our joyful anticipation of God’s future is rooted in our trust of God and God’s kingdom or in the state of the US and global economy. Suddenly we find out if giving of our first fruits rather than of our left-overs is only lip service or a life-changing commitment.”
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Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 9th, 2008 No Comments »
In his last of a seven-sermon series on “Before a Watching World,” Phil Kniss, lead pastor at Park View Mennonite Church, Harrisonburg, VA., told his congregation that while a broken world needs healing right now, “so do we,” referring to the gathered community of faith. “We need it for every kind of brokenness that we are right now carrying around in our beings–burdens of brokenness in our relationships. There are more than enough burdens that God wants to lift right here in our midst. We are a healing a community, a community of wounded healers.”
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Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 2nd, 2008 No Comments »
In her All Saints Day sermon, Barbara Moyer Lehman, associate pastor of Park View Mennonite Church, Harrisonburg, VA, remembered and celebrated the people in the congregation’s life who kept the faith in difficult and dark times, for those who persevered through health problems and relationships without knowing what was ahead for them. The names of more than 100 persons in the church’s half century life were read during the worship service.
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