Two Recent Sermons on Ephesians 1

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It’s been nine months since I last posted (Scott came through with a post in the meantime - thank you, Scott!). Thankfully, that doesn’t mean I’ve been completely intellectually dormant, however.

One of the things that absorbed the all-too-limited bandwidth that I have to give to theology in my current stage of life was, perhaps surprisingly, preaching. I did my share of preaching back in seminary, but I haven’t made it a habit since then. However, my family’s home congregation is currently in the midst of pastoral transition and I offered to plug some gaps over the summer.

Consequently, I wrote and preached my first sermons in well over a decade. As it happens, Ephesians 1 was presented to me by the lectionary for the first Sunday that I stepped into the pulpit. I’ve always had a soft spot for Ephesians, and how could I pass up the opportunity to preach about election in a Presbyterian church? So, I didn’t pass it up. The sermon was entitled “Choices.”

But that passage from Ephesians 1 stuck in my craw, in part due to current events. The failed assassination of former president Trump occurred the day before I preached the first sermon. So I abandoned the lectionary for my second sermon, which came about a month later, and stuck with that passage from Ephesians. This time I focused not on election but on soteriology: what does it mean to say that we have redemption through Christ’s blood? The sermon’s title, perhaps unsurprisingly, was “Blood.” And, as a teaser, I’ll just say that it includes reflections on my childhood love of the A-Team TV show as well as on the myth of redemptive violence.

I offer the recordings here for any of you, gentle readers, who might be curious.





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