Sermons are by Pastor Stephen Springer. For questions or comments, email him at pastor@doveofpeacetucson.org. All sermons are in PDF format. You can download Adobe Acrobat reader free using the link below. Cassette tapes of sermons can be mailed to you from our office. For more information: office@doveofpeacetucson.org.
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SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 2010 "DOVE IS: Inteional About Generations. " "Churches say that the children are the future. And they’re right. But they aren’t going to be in this church. Our children are going to be adults living in Seattle or Madison or Philadelphia. We live in a mobile society. The kids at Dove of Peace today are not going to be the adults that are here tomorrow. For the most part."
text of sermon: PDF file
audio 12 MB MP3 file for download (to save, right click and "Save as...")
SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2010 "DOVE IS: Personal Story (Witness) " "Witness is your personal story. Or my personal story. Or Mary’s personal story. It may not be theologically correct. Mary did not have the benefit of a seminary education. Like the disciples, Mary did not fully understand Jesus when he was sitting right there with her. Her witness, however-- even though she did not understand it herself– her witness was crucial to Christianity."
text of sermon: PDF file
audio 12 MB MP3 file for download (to save, right click and "Save as...")
SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 2010 "DOVE IS: Social Justice " "God is saying to his people,'Can we talk?'... God wants to talk to his people about social injustice. His people have a temple, where they celebrate holy days in God’s honor, and sacrifice animals in God’s honor. There’s a bunch of ritual. And meanwhile the hungry are not fed. The weak and the disadvantaged are run over. The rich get richer. And the poor get poorer. And God wants to talk about this."
text of sermon: PDF file
audio 12 MB MP3 file for download (to save, right click and "Save as...")
SUNDAY, AUGUST 1, 2010 "DOVE IS: Worship " "Worship changes like trees change. All living things are different year by year... I think we need to make sure we understand what is going on. Even though it may be beneath the surface of things, God’s Grace is working and active. And our mission is to receive it well, and share it well. Two verbs. And worship, which is the center of Christian life and of the Church’s existence– worship is
the most important place of all for claiming God’s active Grace and sharing it."
text of sermon: PDF file
audio 15 MB MP3 file for download (to save, right click and "Save as...")
SUNDAY, JULY 25, 2010 "DOVE IS: Ministry of the Laity." "This is an aspect of our Lutheran identity. The priesthood of all believers. You have a pastor, here, but not a priest. Because all of us are priests. The word priest means that you are a go-between between humans and God. You bring God to people, and you bring people to God. That’s what a priest does. We’re all priests. It’s embedded in the architecture of this building."
text of sermon: PDF file
SUNDAY, JULY 18, 2010 " DOVE IS: Creation Minded." "God uses the world to inspire in us a sense of wonder. God made the world wondrous. It is one of the main reasons that people come to believe in God in the first place. Whether they study the rocks, or the birds, or the oceans. And so the continued abuse and destruction of God’s wonders is a sin, an attack on God’s honor."
text of sermon: PDF file
SUNDAY, JULY 11, 2010 " DOVE IS: Ecumenical." "An ecumenical church does not claim to have a monopoly on the truth. We don’t claim to be the only ticket to heaven. To be God’s Church and to serve all the people on this earth, we need Pentecostals. We need Episcopalians. We need the Coptic Church of Egypt. In order to be whole."
text of sermon: PDF file
SUNDAY, JULY 4, 2010 Independence Day. "I love America from below. I love Woody Guthrie’s America. That’s safer for me and for my spirituality. Loving America from above is not easy for me. These grand visions of America as God’s chosen nation, the idea that the USA is the savior of the world, the conviction that America is infallible in everything she does just as some believe that the Pope is infallible in every thing that he teaches, these are concepts that I am not able to reconcile with my religious faith.."
text of sermon: PDF file
SUNDAY, JUNE 27, 2010 Galatians 5:1, 13-25. "Works are the things that we do to escape from freedom. To escape from the anxiety of God’s presence. There are noble works. And there are shameful works. But they are still works, preoccupied with our selves, our egos, and our self-justification."
text of sermon: PDF file
SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010 Luke 8:26-39. "We see a metaphor for our own paths to healing, especially for the one fourth of us who have suffered from mental illness in the last year."
text of sermon: PDF file
SUNDAY, MAY 8, 2010 "In the darkest hours, the most unpeaceful of days, while Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite were reporting all of these shocking things, in a world gone mad, Christians formed a community called Dove of Peace."
text of sermon: PDF file
audio 16.4 MB MP3 file for download (to save, right click and "Save as...")
SUNDAY, AUGUST 16, 2009 1 Kings 2:10–12; 3:3–14. "The Old Testament kind of wisdom usually comes through age and experience. And our culture disdains age and experience. One of the ways I can gauge our culture’s shallowness is that not only do we fail to speak of wisdom. We fail to speak of its opposite, which is folly."
text of sermon: PDF file
(no audio available)
READ the related scriptures: 1 Kings 2:10–12; 3:3–14
SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2009 John 6:35, 41-51. "So Jesus compared himself to bread. Not to meat. Not to fruit. Not to cheese. Not to eggs. But bread. The common component– and the filling component– of the diet for so many human beings. Common, yet nourishing. Common, yet really a miracle, for anyone who has ever made bread themselves."
text of sermon: PDF file
audio 13.4 MB MP3 file for download (to save, right click and "Save as...")
READ the related scriptures: John 6:35, 41-51
SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, 2009 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a. The prophet Nathan confronts David about his wrongdoing. This story gives us an opportunity to examine the Lutheran concept of the Law. "The chief function or power of the law is to make original sin manifest and show man to what utter depths his nature has fallen and how corrupt it has become. So the law must tell him that he neither has nor cares for God or that he worships strange gods — something that he would not have believed before without a knowledge of the law. Thus he is terror-stricken and humbled..." [Luther, The Smalcald Articles]
text of sermon: PDF file
audio: 14 MB MP3 file for download (to save, right click and "Save as...")
READ the related scripures, 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a and Psalm 51:1-12
