Sermons by Vicar Alex Aivars (Page 2)

A couple of months ago I watched the documentary “Minimalism” on Netflix. I’m a junky for documentaries, and this one seemed especially interesting. The description caught my eye with its rejection of American consumerism by emphasizing “less is more,” and of course it’s promise that it would bring me happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happier? In the documentary, the people interviewed had given up material possessions to one degree or another. On the extreme end were 2 men who had quit their high-paying jobs in corporate America to live a minimalist lifestyle. One of the men boasted of owning less than 300 items…

I feel that there is one part in particular in our passage for today that those of us here at Wicker Park Lutheran Church can pretty easily relate to. It’s the part where water is getting into the boat… so we have water getting into a place that it shouldn’t be. Does this sound familiar to anyone here? Unwanted water? Maybe? For those who don’t know what I’m talking about I’m referring to the flooding of the basement that has been occurring here over the past few months. It’s why we have had a huge capital campaign to raise funds to repair the basement. Now that this problem has been going on for a few months, I’m sure the question on some your minds is “God, why are you delaying taking care of this problem?”…

There is this quote that I often see, in various forms, that circulates every so often around the internet. It is “A lie can travel half-way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This quote has been attributed to various people: Mark Twain, Winston Churchill among others. But the original person was Charles Spurgeon in 1859. Now 1859, can you believe that? That is 150 years ago. 150 years! It seems like this quote could easily describe our present time, right? Although we have this new modern term for lie we would use today: fake news. So a modern upgrade to this quote would be “Fake news can travel half-way around the world while the truth is still composing the first letter of a tweet.”…