"God and Science"
A Sermon Series in April 2005

As was the case with the previously posted sermon series, I have posted this sermon series at the prompting of people who heard them in worship. I would like to repeat here some of the comments that I made to introduce the previous series, and add a few others.

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. Keep in mind, too, that what are posted here are manuscripts of the sermons, not transcripts of the sermons. There were some variations in the actual deliveries.

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 17 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.

I was in large measure moved to do this series by a similar series preached by Adam Hamilton at The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in metro Kansas City. His high-quality sermons were enormously helpful in getting me started, and in giving me a frame of reference against which to assess my work. The reader familiar with Pastor Hamilton's sermons will immediately recognize where I have plucked items from them and will quickly realize also that my sermons are substantially different from his.

God bless you in your efforts to wrestle with "God and Science", and may you grow in grace and wisdom.

S. John Roth