An audio file of the sermon from worship this morning is available for listening or downloading at this link.
A PDF file of the worship bulletin can be downloaded at this link.
An excerpt from the sermon:
“This is not a problem you can solve on your own. It wasn’t something people could solve on their own two thousand years ago, nor was it long before that. And it isn’t a problem you can solve for yourself today.
“By now I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve quoted to you the first sentence of Reinhold Niebuhr’s great book, The Nature and Destiny of Man, but as the Apostle says, “It is no trouble for me to say the same things to you, and for you it is a safeguard.” In 1964, that year historian Jon Margolis dubbed “the last innocent year,”[1] Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “Man has always been his own most vexing problem,” which shows that year wasn’t so innocent after all. Nothing has ever been more true, more wise to the ways of the world. And by now it has become unavoidably clear that we are a vexing problem we cannot solve for ourselves. If we could, we would have already done it.
“Paul has what turns out to be the only solution. You have to stop trying to solve the problem that is you all by yourself.
[1] Jon Margolis, The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964—the Beginning of the “Sixties”. (New York: William Morrow, 1999).
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