Sermons by Bob Rhodes
Nurture
Our series on the vows we make at baptism continues with the fourth promise, and this one belongs to the congregation rather than to the person being baptized: to nurture one another in the Christian faith and life, and to include in our care the people standing before us. Most of us were formed by someone who made that promise about us, a Sunday school teacher, a choir director, a neighbor. Few of us think of ourselves as the ones…
Confess
Our series on the vows we make at baptism continues with the third promise: to confess Jesus Christ as Savior and to serve him as Lord. Confessing means saying out loud who Jesus is to us, and allowing our confession to change the way we live in the world. Every one of us answers that question somehow, whether we say it or just live it. This week we explore what this means, and where we find the confidence to trust…
Accept
This week our series on the baptismal vows turns to the second promise: to accept the freedom and power God gives us to resist evil, injustice, and oppression. In Isaiah, the devotion God looks for is feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger, and in Romans, Paul reminds a struggling church that they are children of God in a world still waiting to be free. There is power already in our hands, and we ask how to use it for…
Renounce
This Sunday we begin a new five-week series on the vows we make at baptism. We start with the first vow: to renounce. Renouncing means turning away from whatever controls us and deciding who we’ll follow instead. It’s an authentic look at who and what we serve, and at the freedom God gives to choose differently. Scripture: Joshua 24:14-18; Romans 8:1-11 (CEB)
This Holy Mystery
This is the final week of our Wesleyan Vile-tality series. Across the series we’ve looked at what changes when we stop managing how our faith looks to other people, the same freedom John Wesley found when he left the pulpit to preach in open fields among the people the respectable church had ignored. This week explores the challenges of a focus on appearance, and what might be possible when we let that focus go. Scripture: Luke 24:13-16 (CEB)
Upside Down
This is the final week of our Wesleyan Vile-tality series. Across the series we’ve looked at what changes when we stop managing how our faith looks to other people, the same freedom John Wesley found when he left the pulpit to preach in open fields among the people the respectable church had ignored. This week explores the challenges of a focus on appearance, and what might be possible when we let that focus go. Scripture: 2 Samuel 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42…
How Is It with Your Soul?
We continue our “Wesleyan Vile-tality” series, and have followed the history of the people called Methodist. As the movement they built grew into an institution, more than once, the people lost their nerve. This week we turn to the ones who worked prophetically from within, refusing to leave and refusing to behave. They formed communities of accountability and care, and kept asking one plain and profound question: How is it with your soul? Scripture: Jeremiah 20:7-13 (NRSVue), Matthew 10:24-39 (CEB)
The Respectable Church
Our Wesleyan Vile-tality series has traced the people called Methodist from their polished, respectable later years back toward the bold, boundary-crossing faith of their beginnings. This week we read from the ancient prophets who challenged the people who loved their worship more than action. When our singing and our justice drift apart, how does God respond? What does God call us to do? This week we consider what happens when churches prize reputation over neighbors, and what it takes for…
Open Fields
This week our Wesleyan Vile-tality series follows the early Methodist movement out of the church and into the open, where Wesley and the first Methodists went to the imprisoned, the laborers, and the outcasts. We see the same pattern in two scriptural examples: Abram, told to leave his country and his father’s house for a land God will show him only as he goes, and Matthew, called up from his tax booth to follow and to make room at his…
The Prisoner’s Friends
As we continue “Wesleyan Vile-tality,” we go back to the years before Bristol, when John Wesley and a small group of Oxford students spent their time among prisoners the rest of the city preferred to forget. This week explores what it means to show up for someone the world has written off, why trust between unequal people requires more than credentials, and how the very word “Methodist” was born from solidarity with the forgotten. Luke 4 and Hebrews 13 frame…
More Vile
This week launches a new six-week series inspired by Dr. Ashley Boggan’s book “Wesleyan Vile-tality.” In 1739, John Wesley decided to “submit to be more vile” and preach in Bristol’s open fields to people the established church had ignored. We begin this series on Pentecost with two passages about the Holy Spirit showing up among people no one authorized and in places no one expected. What happens when God’s Spirit refuses to stay where we put it? Scripture: Acts 2:1-21…
Emulate Christ
This week we close our post-Easter series Reckless Love with a look at what it means to follow Jesus’ example with our whole lives. In John 13, Jesus kneels before his disciples and washes their feet. In Matthew 25, he identifies himself with the hungry, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned. This week, we consider these core questions that undergird the entire series: whose examples are we following, and what does it look like to follow them with our…