Sermons from June 2026

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…

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)

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…

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…