Sermons

In addition to my other posts, I have decided that it would be appropriate to post some of my sermons as well.  I have, in the past, been requested to make them available, so I figured if people would like to read them I could post a few.  These are slightly different than the delivered sermons since I never read my manuscript verbatim.  Please also remember, I am still only a Vicar, so be gracious in your assessments of them.

When posting my sermon, I will attempt to always post the main text that it comes from to make it easier to follow along.

Bill

Prezi

For the last four months, I have been teaching a bible study on Paul's book of Romans, and while teaching I gave an attempt at using a new style of presentation software called Prezi.  I was introduced to Prezi at the Digital Gospel Conference by Bill Johnson at the seminary while I was working for him and John in EdTech.  

 One of the biggest strengths of using Prezi is you are not limited to a storyboard presentation.  Instead the presenter is given a large blank space to develop then let loose.  In the presentation you can zoom in and zoom out at any time, which means I was able to embed notes into the text of the passage, and all i had to do is zoom in to reveal the notes.  This also means that a timeline could be hidden in the P of Paul, and other notes could be used aesthetically.

 

 Unfortunately, while this has great power, there is also an issue, it requires an internet connection to build the presentation, and while I have yet to have it tell me that the presentation is full, it gets choppy after a while if you keep adding content.  My original intent for this was to have one "board" for the entire book of Romans, but I quickly realized that this was not a practical hope.  Around the same time as this realization my computer started crashing every other time it was plugged into a projector, so the Prezi was put on the back-burner for more traditional presentation tools.  I really liked it as a tool, but the time needed to build the presentation and then the following computer issues were making this unusable. (Side note:  The computer issues appear to be a hardware and driver issues, not a Prezi issue.)

My brother-in-law has shown that it has been a great tool for teaching his college level music classes, so at least someone is getting good use out of this amazing tool.  Maybe when I get a new computer down the road I'll return to this again.

Resolutions

(This is a re-posting of my monthly letter for the newsletter for Holy Cross)
We are coming up to the end of a new year and the beginning of another. With the holidays and the celebration of New Year’s Eve we tend to make resolutions to be better in the New Year. You can end this sentence, “This year I promise I will…” with a variety of endings. Most likely it would be a good thing to be resolved, but promise without action means nothing. Promising to diet is great until you realize you still have five batches of cookies to eat. The promise of exercise is great until you realize that you have gone so long without exercising that the first session you exercise again make you stiff for a week. Resolutions are often better remembered as great ideas that you haven’t been able to keep in the past, but this year will be different. And what makes it worse, is most resolutions are things that we should already be doing. Call it willpower, lack of time, or whatever you will, but we are sinful humans and we tend to be good at finding excuses for not doing the things that we ought to be doing already. Exercise, eating healthy foods, and other resolutions are things that we should be attempting to do anyways, without “New Year’s Resolutions.”
We make the resolutions to become better human beings though because we know that we are not perfect. We know that we should be better, but we seem to be unable to overcome our shortcomings. Even Paul had this same problem. In Romans 7:19-20 he declared:

“For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.”

Because of our fallen nature we are unable to fix ourselves.
Thanks be to God that we don’t have to fix ourselves. We have the Savior that came as a baby to take away all our brokenness and to declare to the entire world that we are a blessed child of God. He had no need for resolutions because he came in perfection to wipe away all imperfections. We can rejoice that God has done what we could not.
Go ahead, make New Year’s resolutions. Remember, even if we fall short another year, we are still children of God.