Recent Sermons

Rev. Ellen Jennings

~ Psalm 103, 1-13 Psalms for Praying, Matthew 7:1-5, 12 NRSV ~

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.  Meanwhile
the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

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Tonetta Landis-Aina
~ Job 42 ~Final Sermon in Sassy Love, Sacred Faith series ~

Not too long ago, I read of a woman whose teenage son was killed in a car accident, his life cut short much, much too soon (Newsom). On the morning of his funeral, she decided to begin the day by reaching for her Bible. This mother – who must have been dealing with aching despair and the abyss of grief – decided to read the divine

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Tonetta Landis-Aina
~ Job 38-41, Sermon 4 in Sassy Love, Sacred Faith series ~

Cleveland Park, I’m aware that over the course of these last few Sundays you may have grown suspicious of me. I’ve talked to you about the cockamamy book of Job . . . about a nearly incomprehensible conversation in heaven which results in an ethically dubious divine test on earth. And I’ve talked to you about a man who responds to that test with sass, curses,

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Tonetta Landis-Aina

What is theodicy?

• Word theodicy was invented by 17^th century thinker, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  • Made up of two words, “theos” = God/ “dike” = justice
  • The word literally means “justifying God” (Ehrman).
• “Theodicy, in other words, refers to the problem of how God can be ‘just’ or ‘righteous’ given the fact there is so much suffering in the world” (Ehrman 7).
• An attempt “to rationally defend a supposedly all-loving God against the lamentable whys in the world”

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Tonetta Landis-Aina
~ Job 9:1-4;32-35, Sermon 3 in Sassy Love, Sacred Faith series ~

“I don’t know how my mother walked her trouble down/I don’t know how my father stood his ground/I don’t know how my people survived slavery/I do remember that’s why I believe/I don’t know how the rivers overflow their banks/I don’t know how the snow falls and covers the ground/I don’t know how the hurricane sweeps through the land every now and then/Standing in a rainstorm I

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