Isaiah’s servant has no beauty or majesty to attract us. Pastor Adam closes the series on Christmas with three things about that Jesus — despised, broken, and salvific — and a boy in a riptide who pushed his own board away insisting he did not need help.

Easter, and the risen Jesus walking into a locked room… read more

Palm Sunday, and a culture that has lost the ability… read more

Proverbs does not generally promise or command — it observes, and the observations hold most of the time rather than always. Reading it as guarantee produces disappointment; reading it as accumulated pattern produces something usable.

The Sunday after Christmas opens with Sinatra, and a stated purpose: wisdom to set 2022 on a different trajectory than the two years before it. Proverbs suits that — wisdom literature is a distinct genre, accumulated observation rather than promise or command.

Pastor Adam opens Christmas Eve with a question rather than a text: when did it start feeling like Christmas? The manger is the answer precisely because it resists atmosphere — a feeding trough is not evocative, it is simply what was available.

Mark’s Easter account is the strangest of the four: the women find the stone already moved, and run. Pastor Adam preaches it, and Pastor Jim reads the gospel in his late brother’s Easter tie, answering what difference resurrection makes with someone specific in mind.

The last Sunday of the year lands on James 1 and its instruction to consider trials joy. Pastor Adam works it through endurance, notes how little in modern life teaches it, and sends the congregation into the new year on three words: exist, perceive, endure.

Dr. James Smith III preaches the angel’s announcement as the answer to why Jesus came. The shepherds are not told to feel better; they are told something has happened, in a named town, with a verifiable sign attached, and the joy follows the fact.