"Facing Tough Issues"
A Sermon Series in August 2004

I have posted this sermon series at the prompting of people who heard them in worship. Please allow me a few comments before you launch into the sermons.

Every sermon is a contextual event, and not directly transferable to other settings. In fact, privately reading a sermon is a communication experience considerably different from hearing and seeing one. Much of the message of a sermon is communicated by the preacher's manner of speech: cadence, volume, tenor, pace, etc. The reader gets none of this. Therefore, a reader is in some ways more vulnerable to misinterpreting the preacher's message than a hearer is. Please be aware of this.

Also, it is significant to the original context of these sermons that I had been the solo pastor at Faith Lutheran Church for more than 16 years. This church grants me a level of trust, respect, and openness - and therefore authority to speak - well beyond the official authority granted to me by my formal call. If you have not served a long-term pastorate, I do not expect you to appreciate the importance of this to the communication process. But I want readers to be aware of it. The image of me that you construct in your mind as you read these sermons - an image that will affect how you interpret the sermon message - will not be the image(s) of me in the minds of people of Faith Lutheran Church. And these sermons were written for Faith Lutheran Church.

Finally, what are posted here are manuscripts of the sermons, not transcripts of the sermons. There were some variations in the actual deliveries.

If you are a pastor considering preaching such a series, I urge you to give it plenty of lead time. I began asking myself whether such a series was needed at our church while on a six-month sabbatical during the first half of 2003, and I floated the idea with several groups, including our church council, in spring 2004.

God bless you in your efforts to wrestle with "tough issues" and grow in grace and wisdom.

S. John Roth