Rev Chris Roth

1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12 The Corinthian church was a mess. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is one of the earliest Christian writings (53-54AD) and isn’t it interesting that it is a letter written to a church full of problems. It is a church dealing with incest, lust, pride, greed, division, members dragging one another to court, church members visiting prostitutes, confusion about eating food dedicated to pagan idols, arguments about which spiritual gifts are more important, divisions based on which leader they wanted to follow, … among other issues. Corinth was a busy boom town. People looking to make a buck flocked to the city from all over. It had a mixture of people from all kinds of backgrounds. It seemed to have the moral standards that often go with a boom town- lots of greed- lots of desire to buy pleasures. The city boasted a temple of Aphrodite that housed 1000 temple prostitutes. The issues we find in the city are dragged into the church with the...

Isaiah 49:1-7 Psalm 40:1-11 1 Corinthians 1:1-9 John 1:29-42 We have entered into the season after Epiphany. It is a time of revelation. The sheet is drawn back and we see something we didn’t see before. It is revealed to John the Baptist that there is something deeper about Jesus. He says, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him”, which was the sign God told John to look for. This man would baptize with the Holy Spirit, which is the baptism John’s Baptism symbolized. John is convinced that this is the Son of God and the Lamb of God. … These are things that were revealed to John. They aren’t things he figured out. They are things God told him. Unless God reveals Himself to us we are hopeless to really know much of anything about God. But revelation comes with a number of difficulties. One of them is, how can we really grasp God? The way many atheists get God wrong is when they think that God is a being like superman- just a ...

Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12;  Matthew 2:1-12 There's a little known Christmas story that I would like to share with you. It is from Revelation chapter 12. “A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who 'will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.' And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne.  The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might b...