Featured Sermons
Sermons at Pearl seek to engage the ancient stories, poems, and letters in the Bible through imaginative oration that rouses our wholeness as human beings. The act of the sermon at Pearl is space to ponder the sacred, opportunity to consider the mystery and love of God, and provocation to slow down, to think deeply, and to be stirred and inspired to bountifully live.
Below, you can find a selection of sermons that articulate our story, our values, and ideas that have been important in shaping us as a community.
Looking for the most recent sermons? See our current sermon series, or our complete sermon archive.
Pearl’s Story
Each year on the first weekend in August, we take a moment to pause and look back at our story, and all the ways our community has changed and grown over the years. On this, our 19th anniversary, Pastor Mike reflects on the way being a church together has caused us to change our mind, again and again, toward love.
Our Rhythms
This sermon series intends to remind us of the rhythms that we are intentionally cultivating together at Pearl Church; with practice they become, over time, deeply embedded ways of being more fully human in this world.
Our Values
Four years and eight months ago we began dealing with the difficulty of a president who preferred cynicism, marginalization, othering, and violence as means to leading our country. Eighteen months ago we began dealing with Covid 19 and the havoc it’s wreaked on our world and individual lives. And fifteen months ago we began newly waking to white supremacy and systemic racism in our country. In the midst of it all, we’ve marched, screamed, voted, scoured for toilet paper, sown masks, choked on smoke, experienced power outages, and felt, perhaps more than ever before, at the end of ourselves. In light of all that we’ve been facing, many of us are feeling untethered and are wondering, “What is this?” and “Where am I?” and even “Who am I?” When life feels like a ship riding out a wild storm, we risk being tossed to and fro, without any sight of the end. However, below the surface, at the soul level of who we want to be is the clear and steady guidance of our values, which reflect the life of Jesus who invites us into his way of being in the world. It’s our sincere hope that this sermon series on our community’s values can cast an elevated vision for the kind of life that we desire to embody, no matter what we face in life.
Why Be Christian?
After necessarily deconstructing Christianity that’s based on biblical inerrancy, Divine wrath, and exclusion in Jesus’ name, people often find themselves asking, “Why should I be Christian?” This important question comes from a place that is much deeper than cynicism. It’s an honest question. Why—if the Bible isn’t inerrant, God is love, and Jesus’ table is open to every person—should anyone identify as a Christian today? This sermon series will explore non-violent and non-dominion reasons for being deeply, yet humbly Christian, today.
Evolving Christianity
The notion of evolution precedes science. In its earliest form, evolution, from the Latin evolutio, referred to “unrolling,” meaning opening out or development. This idea—that life, this world, people, and even consciousness are ever-becoming—is consistent with what we see when we look back at human history. Over time, earlier forms of anything that continues to exist have developed and diversified. With this in mind, this sermon series has three aims. First, it intends to explore the development and diversification of Christian thought. Second, it will trace the roots of contemporary Christian thought in the ancient heart and way of Jesus. Third, it will celebrate the evolution of Divine Love, which is always propelling humankind forward into ever-more love and inclusion.
The Christian Mysteries
Throughout its long history, the Christian community has pondered a set of mysteries drawn from the life of Jesus. Mystery—this word, in its ancient sense, points toward something hidden, a dawning awareness that unfolds only slowly through musing, reflection, pondering. In this sense, these Christian treasures—Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Trinity—are not fixed dogmas with singular meaning. In this series we will explore how these evocative images continue to disclose new meaning today, illuminating our lives as we hold the story of Jesus in conversation with our evolving understanding of justice, goodness, and reality itself.
Voices from the Wilderness
In Epiphany the church basks in the light of Christ revealed to us. Yet simultaneously we live in a world divided by difference, riven by power structures that alienate and marginalize. To our surprise, the light of God shines upon us from the other, as God listens attentively to the voice of cries from the wilderness. In showing his mercy to the oppressed, God is revealed to them in ways the powerful do not know, so that our salvation is wrapped up into listening to their voices.
This recurring sermon series began in Epiphany 2018, with additions in the following years.
Moving it All Forward
The Bible—this library of ancient documents, written over centuries by many authors—presents the modern reader with significant challenges. Inspired by the beauty of a psalm or the mercy of Jesus’ words, we turn the page only to read something that feels violent or backward. How can we hold this text as sacred story when much of what we find in its pages is clearly not good?
In this series, we aim to hold the Bible as a library with a trajectory. As humanity grows and its apprehension of God becomes richer, we see a record of movement forward from sacrifice to gift, from vengeance to mercy, from exclusion to inclusion, from ideas of divine violence to demonstration of divine solidarity. We’ll explore how passages that seem violent to us today, represented a move forward in the author’s time and culture—and how these stories can inspire us to look for where the Divine beckons us forward, today.
The Story of the Bible
Each year around Labor Day we take time to look over the story of the Bible, exploring this library of ancient, messy, intriguing and sacred stories that ground our community. This second part of two explores the books in the Bible that move the chronological story forward.
A Critique on Violence in Religious Story-Telling
Throughout the Season of Lent, the Church intentionally walks with Jesus through experiences of suffering and death. However, ultimately, this annual journey of descent culminates in resurrection, which encourages our lenten pilgrimage to see what gifts and lessons may be found in the darkness.
This year, rather than exploring experiences of suffering and death that culminate in resurrection, we’re considering violence in religious story-telling, which finds its end, not in resurrection, but in the perpetuation of increased violence. The past few years our country has been witness to a president whose stories have harmed—more than anyone else—the marginalized among us, and these stories have found resonance in the hearts of Christians, evangelicals in particular. This sermon series will deconstruct religious stories that give rise to bad news, misogyny, bigotry, and tribalism in Jesus’ name. But rather than concluding in deconstruction, this series intends to reimagine these same stories so that they more thoughtfully and reasonably cohere with Jesus who declares, “The favor of the Lord upon you.”
Discerning Good
If the Bible isn’t a rule book or a clear-cut moral guide for every decision that we need to make, how do we go about discerning what is good? This is a question that our pastoral staff spent a few months discussing, which resulted in an ethical framework for discerning good in an array of circumstances. This framework considers collective and personal stories, principles, as well as several questions that can be asked in order to inch closer toward goodness.
Perhaps you’re in the midst of making a big decision, or perhaps you wrestle with knowing how to discern what’s best when making decisions, or perhaps, as you’ve come to realize that the Bible doesn’t definitively direct particular judgments that you need to make about life and godliness, you’re looking for a thoughtful way to make wise decisions. If any of these statements speak to where you’re at, then we’re hopeful that this sermon series—which will draw from our ethical framework—will inform, support, and encouragement your flourishing, especially now, when discerning goodness is increasingly important.
Wrestling with Words
This sermon series intends to consider, ponder, mediate upon, and wrestle with really beautiful, really important, Christian words that have been so overused or so misused or so narrowly used, that, for many of us, they have lost their meaning. The goal of this series is not to perfectly understand every word, nor is it to precisely define every word. Instead, the goal of this series is to wrestle with words in order that we might be able to reimagine their profound beauty, texture, and depth. Genesis 32 sets a narrative context for this sermon series. In this passage Jacob is blessed by wrestling with God. It is in the wrestling, not the conclusion of the wrestling, that Jacob is blessed.