Coppertop Sermons

It’s All Small Stuff

Sermon preached July 24, 2011

Text: Matthew 13:31-33, 44-46

A few years ago, driving in the car, I heard a woman named Loretta LaRouche being interviewed. Loretta LaRouche is an author and speaker, and when I heard her, she was talking about our remarkable ability as human beings to “awfulize” and “catastrophize” – –

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Gifted or Grifted

Sermon preached July 10, 2011

Text: Genesis 25:19-34

A good story bears repeating. So here goes. When the founder of Hasidic Judaism, the great Rabbi Israel Shem Tov, saw misfortune threatening the Jews, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire,

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Restful Restlessness

Sermon preached July 3, 2011

Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

In a celebrated 1936 essay entitled “The Crack Up,” Minnesota-born author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One

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Even Higher

Sermon preached June 26, 2011

Texts: Matthew 10:40-42

Don and Janet, my dad’s uncle and aunt, were among my favorite relatives growing up. They owned a modest home in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. Don worked in the maintenance department at the high school, Janet was a school cook. Whenever my family visited, they always had

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Dance With Me

Sermon preached June 19, 2011

Texts: Genesis 1:1-5, 26-31; 2:1-4; Matthew 28:16-20

Dance With Me, Orleans, 1975

So… How did I get from Genesis 1 and Matthew 28 to a song from 1975 stuck in the jukebox in my brain? We may not have sufficient time this morning to solve that mystery, but

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