Will Vaus

I have a confession to make… I don’t deserve to be your pastor… “Why?” you might ask… The answer is: because I didn’t go to Sunday School. Now, as soon as I said that I realized it wasn’t quite true. I did go to Sunday School growing up, just not very much. I do have a certificate that says I graduated from one Sunday School department to another when we lived in New York. (Mind you: this was in the heyday of the Church when congregations had graded Sunday Schools.) But I only have one or two distinct memories of Sunday School in New York. And you all know the story of the one time I attended Sunday School in this church as a child. I ran out!  My family moved to California when I was seven. I have only one distinct memory of Sunday School in California. I wasn’t even there when they handed out Bibles to fourth graders. So, you are getting the picture… I have a dismal Sunday School record. But I do have a superpower. I married a woman with a Sunday School pin that reached from her ...

Most parents, at some time or another, have had the experience of thinking they have lost their child. It happened to us when our children were small. We were in the Disney Store at the mall. As we got ready to leave the store, we suddenly realized our middle son, Jon, was not with us. He was probably 5 years old or younger at the time. We looked all around the store. He was nowhere to be found. Then we stepped outside the store and looked in every direction. Finally, we saw him, one store down, standing with a security guard. What a relief!   Well, I think almost every parent can identify. And the story we are going to read today from the Gospel of Luke is a story about two parents losing their son and finding him again. But the story is also about so much more. Listen for God’s word to you from Luke 2:41-52…   Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover.   And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival.   ...

  Christmas is a time of surprises. A lady was preparing her Christmas cookies. There came a knock at the door. She went to find a man, his clothes poor, obviously looking for some Christmas odd jobs. He asked her if there was anything he could do. She said, “Can you paint?”  “Yes,” he said. “I’m a rather good painter.”  “Well,” she said, “there are two gallons of green paint there and a brush, and there’s a porch out back that needs to be painted. Please do a good job. I’ll pay you what the job is worth.”  He said, “Fine. I’ll be done quickly.”  She went back to her cookie making and didn’t think much more about it until there was a knock at the door. She went, and the obviousness of his painting was evident: he had paint all over his clothes. She said, “Did you finish the job.”  He said, “Yes.”  She said, “Did you do a good job?” He said, “Yes. But lady, there’s one thing I’d like to point out to you. That’s not a Porsche back there. That’s a Merced...