Sermons & Such
This final teaching in our series “Remembering there Collective” was given the week of 2020’s US Presidential election, and the day after Joe Biden was declared the President-Elect. In this teaching, Leah considers what healing for a divided country might look like with wisdom from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.
Read Leah’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.
PC: Michael Coughlin
In this teaching given by Haven Teaching Team member Katie Kay, Katie tackles the question of how hope functions, and what it means to have hope without certainty. She explores another kind of resurrection story found in the New Testament that engages these questions, and invites us to consider hope in a helpful new way, in the midst of all the coronavirus uncertainty.
View Katie’s notes here, listen to the teaching, or view the video below.
In this final teaching from the Vulnerable Together series, Leah considers the resurrection story through the lens of vulnerability. What happens to Jesus’ human vulnerability after he is raised from the dead? How do we encounter the Easter story when we are still suffering?
Listen to Leah’s teaching below or read her notes here.
Public domain.
In this teaching, Leah explores questions about healing, sharing a framework that defines healing as broader then cure. She asks questions around how this understanding might help the church do better when ministering to persons with illness or disability, and looks at the story of Jesus healing a person with leprosy. Also, our own Connie Barker shares her vulnerability story about the intersection of being queer, female, and living with a disability. (If you just want to hear Connie's story, listen beginning at minute 35.)
Listen to the teaching below or review Leah’s notes here.
Why did Dr. King and Mother Teresa have such different experiences of hearing from God? Why are some people reportedly healed when prayed for, while others aren't? If God is still active in the world, why are thing so broken and unjust? These are some of the questions Leah wrestles with theologically in this week's teaching from the series, "It's Complicated".
Listen to the teaching below or review Leah's notes here.
I believe I was a sophomore in college when it happened. I had only been really following Jesus less than a year at the point when I was invited to attend my first church conference. The college group I became a part of was loosely affiliated with a Vineyard church, and that church was having a weekend conference. Attending the church on Sundays, let alone for a whole weekend, made me nervous. It was so different from the experience I’d had of church growing up that I didn’t know what to do with it. But I trusted the group’s leader, and he told me that this conference was going to be really powerful in terms of people encountering God, so I went.
’m gonna start today by telling you two stories that took place in my previous church, the Iowa City Vineyard, where I served as a staff pastor for five years. The first happened when a young woman in our congregation brought her father to church. Her parents, who were both long-time church goers themselves, were visiting from out of town. And they decided to accompany her to our church on Sunday morning. Our pastor’s teaching that morning was about healing. It was part of a series of teachings on practicing the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The young woman's father was moved by the teaching. He felt inspired to seek prayer after the service. He had a painful growth in his face, which surgeons were preparing to operate on. So people in our church laid hands on him and prayed for the Holy Spirit to come and bring healing. As they did, he felt God's presence. There was tingling in his face. He began to cry. He knew that God was removing the mass. And sure enough, when he returned to the doctors for surgery that week, the physicians were mystified to find that the mass they intended to remove had already vanished.
