West End UMC Podcast Audio Podcast
942 episodes - English - Latest episode: 11 days ago - ★★★★★ - 11 ratingsMessages presented by Senior Pastor Carol Cavin-Dillon and other speakers during worship at West End UMC in Nashville, TN
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Open-Minded Hope
April 14, 2024 15:00 - 18 minutes - 17.3 MBThis is West End’s annual Youth Sunday when youth take on every role in the service, including all readings, music, and preaching. The two delivering the sermon(s) are Brazier Pierce and Mary Peacock, both of whom give their own experiences related to the scripture from Luke 24:36-48, where the disciples of Jesus, having seen him crucified, are surprised when he appears to them. Brazier and Mary each describe not only personal experiences, but offer how, in brief moments of encounter, we, t...
Forgiveness Is Not What You Think
April 07, 2024 15:00 - 25 minutes - 23.2 MBForgiveness Is Not What You Think – On the Second Sunday of Easter, our Congregational Care Intern, Dr. Tammy Lewis Wilborn, delivers the Communion Meditation, based on the passage from Genesis 45 where Joseph’s brothers have come to Egypt during the famine to seek food. Unbeknownst to them, he is the one from the Egyptian administration who meets with them – they are his brothers who sold him into slavery and told their father he had died. In this scene, Joseph confronts them but with forg...
Life Goes On
March 31, 2024 15:00 - 20 minutes - 18.9 MBEaster Sunday! The Gospel reading for our Easter service is the one from Mark’s Gospel (16.1-8). It is an odd and somewhat unsatisfactory ending to the story in that the three women who go to the tomb and are told that Jesus is risen and are then directed to tell the disciples about that and instruct them to return to Galilee where they will see him. But the final verse says they were afraid and told no one. Scholars say that the earliest forms of this Gospel ended there. The person who ...
What Is Truth?
March 29, 2024 15:00 - 39 minutes - 36.1 MBThis is our Good Friday service, a remembrance held at the traditional hour of the crucifixion of Jesus. It begins with the chiming of the hour, which sets the mood. It includes a reading of two chapters of the Fourth Gospel that describe the arrest, condemnation, crucifixion, and burial of Jesus, a familiar and agonizing section to hear and recall. Rev. Maggie Jarrell, our Pastor of Children and Families, delivers the Good Friday Meditation. The title comes from the scripture reading as ...
Good Friday's Holy Week Meditation - Common Prayer Guided Reading - March 29, 2024
March 29, 2024 15:00 - 6 minutes - 5.77 MBWe welcome you to listen to our Lenten podcast which will offer guided readings of the Common Prayer liturgies from your pastoral team. We are offering podcasts every day during Holy Week. ...
The Reality of Love
March 28, 2024 15:00 - 1 hour - 79.1 MBThis is Maundy Thursday, the service in which we remember and participate in the Last Supper. The scripture for this service is the familiar story from the Fourth Gospel wherein Jesus washes the feet of the disciples and leaves them with the commandment to love one another. Delivering the communion meditation is our Pastor of Spiritual Formation, Rev. Will McLeane. He begins with the contrast in his own children of rejecting the traditional cartoons in favor of “real” people in their progr...
Thursday's Holy Week Meditation - Common Prayer Guided Reading - March 28, 2024
March 28, 2024 15:00 - 8 minutes - 7.43 MBWe welcome you to listen to our Lenten podcast which will offer guided readings of the Common Prayer liturgies from your pastoral team. We are offering podcasts every day during Holy Week. ...
Wednesdays's Holy Week Meditation - Common Prayer Guided Reading - March 27, 2024
March 27, 2024 15:00 - 5 minutes - 4.58 MBWe welcome you to listen to our Lenten podcast which will offer guided readings of the Common Prayer liturgies from your pastoral team. We are offering podcasts every day during Holy Week. ...
Tuesday's Holy Week Meditation - Common Prayer Guided Reading - March 26, 2024
March 26, 2024 15:00 - 5 minutes - 4.77 MBWe welcome you to listen to our Lenten podcast which will offer guided readings of the Common Prayer liturgies from your pastoral team. We are offering this podcast every day during Holy Week. ...
Holy Week Meditation - Common Prayer Guided Reading - March 25, 2024
March 25, 2024 15:00 - 3 minutes - 8.99 MBWe welcome you to listen to our Lenten podcast which will offer guided readings of the Common Prayer liturgies from your pastoral team. We are offering the podcast today, Ash Wednesday, and every day during Holy Week. ...
A Humble Walk
March 24, 2024 15:00 - 26 minutes - 24.4 MBA Humble Walk – Today is Palm Sunday. Through Lent we have been considering what we can do to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly,” and our focus is now on “walk humbly.” The script is the Markan version of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, and we celebrate that with our own palm branches waving as we sing “Hosanna!” We know the scene was of a triumphant Jesus being welcomed and hailed as the long-awaited king. But we also know, as Jesus must have known, that he was about ...
Just Keep Walking
March 17, 2024 15:00 - 28 minutes - 26 MBJust Keep Walking – Through Lent we are considering what we can do to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly,” and our focus is now on “walk humbly.” The scripture today is the familiar story in Mark 10 where James and John ask a favor of Jesus, which is that they be seated at the right and left of Jesus when he comes into his glory. In all the time that the disciples have spent with Jesus, apparently they don’t really understand. We, too, tend to think of rewards, and that seems to be h...
Ordinary Mercies
March 10, 2024 15:00 - 31 minutes - 28.8 MBThrough Lent we are considering what we can do to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly,” and our focus is now on mercy. The scripture today is the familiar parable of Jesus talking about separating the sheep from the goats: “If you have done this for the least of these, you have done it for me.” Jesus is saying that God is near in the needs of the needy. If humans are made in the image of God, then we can surely behold God in our paying attention to the needs of others. That also mean...
A Merciful Messiah
March 03, 2024 16:00 - 29 minutes - 27 MBA Merciful Messiah – Through Lent we are considering what we can do to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly,” and our focus is now on mercy. The scripture today is the encounter of Jesus with blind Bartimaeus who knows Jesus is approaching and calls out to him. Some around the scene react to restrain the blind beggar, but Jesus asks him what he wants Jesus to do. We can put ourselves into the story as the beggar, the crowd, the disciples, or Jesus, but the actions of Jesus teach what w...
What Is and What Can Be: Aligning our Hearts and Heads with God's
February 25, 2024 16:00 - 28 minutes - 25.7 MBWhat Is and What Can Be: Aligning our Hearts and Heads with God’s – Through Lent we are considering what we can do to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly,” and this is the second week our focus is on justice. The reading for today is a passage from Isaiah (10:1-4) that is clearly from a God angry at those who “pronounce wicked decrees” that deprive the needy. Stacey Harwell-Dye, our Pastor of Mercy and Justice Ministries is preaching, and she traces the idea of broken relationships bac...
How the Tables Have Turned
February 18, 2024 16:00 - 22 minutes - 20.9 MBHow the Tables Have Turned – Through Lent we are considering what we can do to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.” The reading for this Sunday is the Markan account of Jesus entering the temple, observing the transactions going on as doves and other sacrificial beings are sold to people arriving to make sacrifices, and Jesus accusing those selling the sacrifices of misusing the Temple. Jesus, enraged, turns the tables of those sellers upside down. To this point in Mark, Jesus has pe...
Lenten Meditation - Common Prayer Guided Reading - February 14, 2024
February 14, 2024 16:00 - 4 minutes - 4.57 MBWe welcome you to listen to our Lenten podcast which will offer guided readings of the Common Prayer liturgies from your pastoral team. We are offering the podcast today, Ash Wednesday, and every day during Holy Week. ...
Observing a Holy Lent
February 14, 2024 16:00 - 15 minutes - 14.3 MBObserving a Holy Lent – This is our Ash Wednesday service of the imposition of ashes, a time of introspection and confession in the forty days leading up to the Easter celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. Rev. Shannon Baxter, our Pastor of Congregational Connection, delivers the homily. In a sense, through these forty days we walk with Jesus through the forty days he spent in the wilderness after his baptism. We also look for practices that help us turn the focus from ourselves to God...
A Beautiful, Terrible Day
February 13, 2024 16:00 - 20 minutes - 18.5 MBThis is our annual Shrove Tuesday Jazz Mass, a celebration before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Aimee Baxter, our Pastor of Young Adults delivers the Communion Meditation, and she begins by giving a number of examples of someone being up, then down. It is much like we will experience with this Shrove Tuesday of celebration and then tomorrow’s Ash Wednesday. The scripture is the Markan version of the baptism of Jesus wherein we read about Jesus’ baptism by John, then his coming u...
Invited to the Thin and Thick Places
February 11, 2024 16:00 - 22 minutes - 20.3 MBInvited to the Thin and Thick Places – This is Transfiguration Sunday, and we read the story from Mark where Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with him to a mountain, and he was transformed before them with Elijah and Moses appearing, too, certifying Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. As she delivers this sermon, Carol gives examples of times when she has been filled with the light of the spirit, calling those the “thin times.” Those kinds of transforming moments are the...
Invited to Come Away and Pray
February 04, 2024 16:00 - 22 minutes - 20.7 MBWe have been reading through the first chapter of Mark, and in today’s reading Jesus and the first four disciples go to the house of Simon and Andrew. There they find Simon’s mother-in-law is sick with a fever. Jesus heals her. Then that evening, everyone in the town gathers in front of Simon’s house, and Jesus heals many who are ill or afflicted with demons. The next morning Jesus goes out by himself to find a deserted place where he can pray. Thus he makes himself unavailable to the cr...
You're Invited into Healing Liberation
January 28, 2024 16:00 - 27 minutes - 25 MBYou’re Invited into Healing Liberation – Today’s passage is from Mark, early in Jesus’ ministry but after he has called the first four disciples. He is in Capernaum, enters the synagogue and begins teaching, and the people are astounded by his authority in that teaching. Then a deranged man cries out, and Jesus exorcises the demon in the man, healing him. Both are demonstrations of the person and mission of Jesus, and this is a learning experience for those new disciples. As we are concer...
Invited to Come and See
January 21, 2024 16:00 - 29 minutes - 27.1 MBToday’s scripture from John 1 is about Jesus meeting Philip and calling him into discipleship, but it is also about Philip, in turn, inviting Nathanael into discipleship, too, with the invitation to “come and see.” The Gospel of John uses that phrase several times, and we are invited to share in the excitement and the invitation. Nathanael’s initial response to the invitation demonstrates some prejudice on his part, but when he actually meets Jesus, all that changes. We are challenged to i...
Invited into Beloved Community
January 14, 2024 16:00 - 23 minutes - 21.9 MBToday, using the account in Mark, we read about the baptism of Jesus by John at the Jordan, and we remember and celebrate our own baptism. A question that often arises with the baptism of Jesus is why would Jesus need to be baptized like the sinners to whom John was preaching, “Repent and be baptized”? Maybe Jesus was baptized and the spirit descended to proclaim he was beloved in order to demonstrate that Jesus was very much one of us and we, too, are beloved. In our own baptism God decla...
Invited to Another Road
January 07, 2024 16:00 - 21 minutes - 19.7 MBInvited to Another Road – This is Epiphany Sunday, the day we remember the trip of the Magi to see the baby Jesus. Although many legends about the magi have grown through the centuries, the account in Matthew is the only account available, and it does not reveal how many magi were in the group, where they came from (it says only “the East”), or how old Jesus was when they made this trip. What we do know is that it was a journey of faith with the goal of worshipping the baby. When they cons...
Looking Backward, Moving Forward
December 31, 2023 16:00 - 36 minutes - 33.4 MBWe have now celebrated the birth of Christ and are at the brink of a new year. The scripture for today is from Joshua, the account of the people crossing the Jordan River into the Promised Land, and God tells them to set up a pile of 12 stones, one for each tribe, as a memorial. Rev. Stacey Harwell-Dye, our Pastor of Mercy and Justice ministries is preaching and says that on New Year’s Eve we often look back on memories while looking ahead to the new year. And that is something that the sc...
Surprising Joy
December 24, 2023 16:00 - 30 minutes - 28.1 MBToday, the fourth Sunday of Advent and also Christmas Eve, the scripture is the section of Luke where the young Mary responds to the announcement of her pregnancy with “the Magnificat,” praising God for raising her from her modest place to this place of honor as mother of this holy infant. This comes when Mary famously visits her cousin, Elizabeth, who is also pregnant, blessed at an old age with a child who will turn out to be John the Baptist. The words of Isaiah, which we have been readi...
Advent Guided Poetry Meditation - Week 4 - Love
December 22, 2023 16:00 - 4 minutes - 4.07 MBAs we enter the fourth week of Advent, take a few minutes to stop, center yourself and ponder this guided meditation on love, led by Rev. Will McLeane.
From Mourning to Morning
December 20, 2023 16:00 - 26 minutes - 24.7 MB– In the season when many people are joyous over the birth of the Christ child, gift giving and receiving, and family gatherings, many among us are experiencing loss, aloneness, grief. This service, held on the longest night of the year, is meant to provide comfort and hold a safe place for those who need quiet reflection. The service incorporates scripture, lighting of candles, prayer, communion, and comforting words. The sermon is delivered by Tammy Lewis Wilborn, our Congregational Care...
Justice and Joy
December 17, 2023 16:00 - 24 minutes - 22.5 MBJustice and Joy – Through this Advent season we are reading words of Isaiah, and today’s prophecy from chapter 64 comes again to a people in despair but offers a glimmer of hope, and beyond that hope it offers comfort and joy. Today, the third Sunday of Advent, we light the third candle, a pink one representing joy, and in that sense this section of Isaiah fits. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus preaches for the first time in his own hometown and uses these words from Isaiah, but the people are ...
Advent Guided Poetry Meditation - Week 3 - Joy
December 15, 2023 16:00 - 4 minutes - 3.98 MBAs we enter the third week of Advent, take a few minutes to stop, center yourself and ponder this guided meditation on peace, led by Rev. Aimee Baxter.
Tidings of Comfort and Joy
December 10, 2023 16:00 - 18 minutes - 17.1 MBThrough this Advent season we are reading words of Isaiah, and today’s prophecy of “Comfort Ye, Comfort Ye My People” comes from chapter 40 but is also familiar to us as the first choral movement in G. F. Handel’s Messiah. The message comes to a people whose city, Jerusalem, has been devastated, the temple destroyed, and they have been displaced and are certainly in need of comfort. That message of comfort is followed by a command to make a straight path through the desert, lowering the mou...
Advent Guided Poetry Meditation - Week 2 - Peace
December 07, 2023 16:00 - 3 minutes - 3.35 MBAs we enter the second week of Advent, take a few minutes to stop, center yourself and ponder this guided meditation on peace, led by Rev. Shannon Baxter.
From Lament to Hope
December 03, 2023 16:00 - 17 minutes - 15.9 MBThis is the first Sunday in Advent, and our scripture is from Isaiah’s words to people who had great reason to feel that God had abandoned them. The prophet describes a God who had done awesome deeds in the past, but then God’s abandonment had given rise to the people’s abandonment of God. The prophet speaks of repentance, a turning around of the people, and a cry out to God to return with all of the mighty presence and works God had exhibited in the past. On the people’s side, besides rep...
Advent Guided Poetry Meditation - Week 1 - Hope
December 01, 2023 16:00 - 5 minutes - 4.88 MBAs we begin the season of Advent, we will be guided by the prophets and by the poetry of E.E. Cummings. Be sure and pick up your Advent guide at church on Sunday or let us know if you need one sent to you. As an added practice each week, we will provide a brief guided meditation through one of Cummings’ poems. Here is the first one to lead us into Sunday.
A Tale of Three Trees
November 26, 2023 16:00 - 27 minutes - 25.6 MB– In January we began a year-long journey through the Bible with Genesis, and today we end that journey with a reading from the last chapter of Revelation. In this final vision of final days John of Patmos sees a city wherein all things are reconciled. A Tree of Life is the focal point, somehow reminiscent of that tree in the Garden of Eden that broke down relationships between God and humans, between humans, and between humans and nature when humans gave into the temptation to trust themse...
The Alpha and Omega
November 19, 2023 16:00 - 24 minutes - 22.3 MBThe Alpha and Omega – In January we began a year-long journey through the Bible with Genesis, and today and next Sunday we end with readings from Revelation. Today’s reading comes from the first chapter where the visionary, John, reports on his encounter with the risen Jesus. The book of Revelation is and has been controversial through the millenia with some people citing it to predict the coming of the apocalypse as a punishment. It helps to know some of the historical setting, and it was...
Quick to Listen
November 12, 2023 16:00 - 29 minutes - 27.4 MBContinuing our journey through the Bible, this week’s reading is from the epistle of James with a particular focus on James 1.19-20 where the writer, writing to a congregation that has apparently had some conflict, cautions them to be “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.” It is a caution appropriate for our era of social media and political division and a teaching that sounds like one Jesus might have given. Anger can be controlling and certainly divisive. We each get angry from...
On the Basis of Love
October 29, 2023 15:00 - 28 minutes - 26.1 MBContinuing our journey through the Bible, this week’s reading is Paul’s letter to Philemon, a letter filled with familial terms, and it is clear that the focus of the letter, Onesimus, has been a slave of Philemon. Although we don’t know how or why Onesimus is currently and has been with an imprisoned Paul, it is clear that Paul is sending Onesimus back to Philemon. Onesimus has become a convert to Christianity, and Paul encourages Philemon to receive the former slave as a brother, to learn...
Free to Bear Fruit
October 22, 2023 15:00 - 29 minutes - 27.3 MBContinuing our journey through the Bible, this week’s reading is from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. In this letter, Paul is frustrated with the church he had helped to form in Galatia. They were largely Gentiles, but apparently some Jewish had moved in and demanded that those in that church obey the Jewish law, including such things as circumcision. Paul says it is not about earning God’s love through obedience to laws but accepting God’s grace. Sometimes an inner voice tells us we’re n...
A God Ever Faithful
October 15, 2023 15:00 - 31 minutes - 29.1 MBA God Ever Faithful – This is the Sunday we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of our church. One of the things we are doing through this 150th year is reading through the Bible and, on Sundays, taking our scripture readings from the books of the Bible in sequence. Today we are looking at a passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, which is a little out of order, but it applies to our own church in that Paul is writing to a church that has taken the journey seriously and, in Paul’s ...
The Importance of Being WE
October 08, 2023 15:00 - 24 minutes - 22.6 MBWe continue our trip through the Bible with today’s reading from 1 Corinthians. Rev. Shannon Baxter, our Pastor of Congregational Connection, is preaching. The text is Paul’s familiar comparison of the community of the church to the members of the body, an analogy that can surely be understood by anyone. Historically, the Corinthian congregation must have had need of such encouragement to come together as one body, with each given unique gifts, not for the benefit of that person, but for t...
The Grace of Uncertainty
October 01, 2023 15:00 - 25 minutes - 22.9 MBWe continue our trip through the Bible with today’s reading from Romans, the first of the letters of Paul. Romans is a multi-layered and intricate letter. Much of the first part of the letter is about God’s grace through which all are welcomed. Then in chapter 12, Paul says, “Therefore” and begins to write about how this oneness in the body of Christ affects how we treat each other. He describes it as a “living sacrifice” that prompts us to surrender ourselves to the grace of God daily. ...
Best Supporting Actor
September 24, 2023 15:00 - 23 minutes - 21.8 MBWe continue our trip through the Bible with today’s reading from Acts, a book that chronicles the early days of Christianity. Our focus is on Barnabas, who plays a minor role in Acts. His character is all about support and encouragement. We may recall that Saul (later Paul) was initially intent on crushing the belief in Jesus until his conversion on the road to Damascus. When Paul went back to Jerusalem to join the Christian movement, the leaders there rejected him because of his previous...
Abiding in the Vine
September 17, 2023 15:00 - 19 minutes - 44.5 MBWe continue our trip through the Bible with today’s reading from the Gospel of John. Early in this gospel, Jesus tells the disciples he will be leaving them, but in this passage Jesus describes himself as the vine and those around him as the branches, telling them that if they “abide in him,” they will have joy, peace, and love (even if he is not physically with them). It is a strong message to us, too, that if we put ourselves into his presence, even if he is not with us physically we will...
Healing Power
September 10, 2023 15:00 - 23 minutes - 21.3 MBWe continue our trip through the Bible with today’s reading from Luke in which Jesus heals two people from very different segments of the community. The writer of Luke seems to have an interest in “the great reversal,” in which, for example, the downtrodden are elevated and those of privilege are taken down. These two healing stories in Luke 7 reflect in the realm of Jesus the equality of a centurion and a widow, whose stations in society are not at all the same. The two stories also comme...
Healing on the Margins
September 03, 2023 15:00 - 25 minutes - 23.8 MBWe continue our trip through the Bible with today’s reading of the familiar story of the healing of the demoniac. In this story, Jesus retreats to Gentile territory, which is unusual for him and makes us wonder whether he knew about this man and intended to go there. The man is clearly out of control and is relegated to “the tombs” away from people. When Jesus arrives, the man asks “What have you to do with me?” But in the end, the demons are exorcized and the man is healed. He asks Jesu...
From Grumbling to Gratitude
August 27, 2023 15:00 - 26 minutes - 23.9 MBWe continue our trip through the Bible with today’s reading of the familiar parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, a parable that appears only in Matthew. In many ways it is shocking because it seems so unfair. The worker who worked all day gets the same pay as the workers who came on the job later, even the same pay as the worker who arrived at the end of the day. It seems economically improper and unfeasible, and in the story the one who worked all day grumbles about it. But he was gi...
The Great Commandment
August 20, 2023 15:00 - 43 minutes - 39.7 MBWe continue our trip through the Bible with today’s reading from Matthew as we begin the New Testament. Our guest preacher is Bishop Ken Carter, currently the bishop of the Western North Carolina Conference, and the text is the familiar encounter when a lawyer tests Jesus by asking him the greatest commandment. Matthew is not the earliest of the Gospels, but it does have the most connections to the Old Testament, frequently quoting the Hebrew scriptures and seeing Jesus as the new Moses. I...
The Persistence of God
August 13, 2023 15:00 - 23 minutes - 21.7 MBWe continue our trip through the Bible with today’s reading from Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament in our Protestant Bible. We’re using Malachi as a lens to examine what we’ve learned about the character of God to this point. Malachi is speaking to the people after they have returned to Jerusalem from exile, and, yet, they are not following God as they should. Malachi speaks out against the people for various things, like neglecting the least and most vulnerable. But Malachi als...