I'll Have The Curry.

A Sermon written for the people of God at The Church at Highland Park, Austin, Texas August 3, 2025 Luke 12:13-21 Have you walked through a clothing store recently, specifically stores like H&M or Zara, or scrolled websites like Shein or Temu? These stores are filled with cute, trendy clothes that are irresistibly cheap in price.  It’s hard NOT to throw it in your cart. A shirt for $9? Heck yah! How about 2? Shein has thousands of pieces to sort through. And when you come back next week, the inventory has completely changed and you have an exciting new selection of clothing to choose from.    Up until the mid-twentieth century, brands created fashion collections for four seasons- fall, winter, spring and summer, planning way in advance to predict what consumers would want.  Inventory would sit on shelves for weeks and when they were sold, they weren’t replenished with something new. We had to wait until the next season. Now we see the “fast fashion” indust...

A Sermon for the People of First Baptist Church of Austin July 20, 2024 Luke 10:38-42 Martha and Mary  by Jerome W. Jones Jr. Distractions Growing up as a pilot’s daughter meant our family’s holiday traditions looked a little different from those around me.   My dad’s work schedule typically looked like three days on and two to three days off. While he was “on”, he was away, flying a Boeing 737 from city to city across the country and sometimes Mexico.   He would call home any chance he got. Because this was the 90’s and cellphones weren’t exactly prevalent like they are now, the chance to talk to him was rare, so we made it a priority to drop what we were doing to hear his voice. Each call began with my dad telling us his current city and my sister and I running to the wall sized-map in our hallway to find his location on the map. Those memories I recall with joy, remembering how fun that was. Other times were more difficult- there were many Christmas mornings we opened ...

A Sermon for the People of First Baptist Church of Austin July 13, 2025 Amos 7:7-17 from  The Economist  article, "The Secret Economics of the Burkin Bag" by Brooke Unger Truth that Costs Something Our text this morning is a challenging one.  It’s full of images of judgement and destruction, heated language, and dramatic encounters. It almost feels like it needs a trigger warning or “not safe for children” label. It’s uncomfortable. Even reading the text aloud from the pulpit made me squeamish. My guess is you felt the same way. It’s not often we read from Amos. It’s not exactly comforting reading. It would be easier to skip over it’s blunt language and difficult truths. No one wanted to hear what Amos had to say 2800 years ago, and I’m not sure we are ready to hear it again today.  Amos requires a lot of work for us to understand what is going on. We know that in order to responsibly read scripture, we must know the context of the text first.  We need to know s...