Category: Sermons

The Prince of Peace

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Sermon for Sunday, December 24, 2023 || Christmas Eve || Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20

I’ve been taking a lot of deep breaths lately. Leah showed me this special way to breathe that she learned in her nursing classes. You breathe in through your nose, pause, and then keep breathing in. Hold for a moment, then exhale slower than you inhaled. Let’s try it together. In, then in again, hold, exhale slowly. You might notice that the pause on the inhale enables you to fill your lungs more fully, to expand your chest, to feel extra spacious inside. I’ve been practicing this type of breathing in my more anxious moments lately and it has helped me embrace the peace of God that surpasses all understanding.

That’s what I’d like to talk about tonight – God’s peace, which we hear about from the Prophet Isaiah and the angels singing to the terrified shepherds. In our world, which is constantly torn apart by war and oppression and environmental cataclysm, our embrace of God’s peace stands as a radical act of witness against all the death-dealing ways of the world.

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Practicing Awareness

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Sermon for Sunday, December 3, 2023 || Advent 1B || Mark 13:24-37; Luke 1:26-38; Matthew 1:18-25

Today we begin again. We begin a new cycle of the church year, of services and celebrations, of feasts and fasts, that provide us the scaffolding for practicing our awareness of God’s presence in our lives. That’s what I’d like to talk about today on this First Sunday of Advent: practicing our awareness of God’s presence.

As the beginning of the church year, Advent is a time of recommitment. We recognize that in all the changes and chances of life, we often fall asleep in our lives of faith. We start sleepwalking through life, going about our days in a fog of tasks and to-dos, and we don’t pause often enough to practice God’s presence in the midst of everything. In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus implores his disciples and us to keep awake for the signs of God’s presence. You know by the blooming fig tree that summer is near, he says. You can read the signs of nature, but only if you keep your eyes open to seeing them. Therefore, keep awake!

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The Shepherd and the King

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Sermon for Sunday, November 26, 2023 || Reign of Christ A || Ezekiel:11-16, 20-24; Matthew 25:31-46

Next Sunday we begin again – another new year in our cycle of celebrations of God’s presence in our midst. But as the 90s band Semisonic reminds us, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” That end happens today. Today we end the current church year with the feast that marks this ending. For years now, I’ve been calling it “Reign of Christ” Sunday instead of its more common name, “Christ the King” Sunday. This morning, I’d like to explain why I made that shift because its theological implications are important for our walks of faith. My apologies ahead of time since this sermon is going to be pretty heavy on history. Hopefully, I have risen far enough from my tryptophan coma to make the next ten minutes make sense.

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We Will Serve the Lord

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Sermon for Sunday, November 12, 2023 || Proper 27A || Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25

I began my very first paid job when I was fifteen. I worked at the independent bookstore, which my mother managed. I served the customers by offering recommendations, ringing up their orders, and gift-wrapping their purchase. I loved that job. My second job was waiting tables at the Logan’s Roadhouse, which is one of those steak restaurants where customers are encouraged to throw their peanut husks on the floor. I served the guests by taking their orders, refilling drinks, and sweeping up those countless peanut shells. I did not love that job. I worked at Olive Garden as a busser, as a camp counselor, and as an assistant at my seminary’s teaching library. Then I got ordained and started serving as a priest. Serving in the church is the only, what I would call, “adult” job I’ve ever had.

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A Better World, with Help from Star Trek

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Sermon for Sunday, November 5, 2023 || All Saints A || Revelation 7:9-17; Matthew 5:1-12

All of this morning’s readings from Holy Scripture point us towards a vision of a better world: a world of mutual understanding, equal justice, and creative peace, all knit together by the God who brings all things back into right relationship with each other. I see this vision in scripture and it brings me, weeping, to my knees at the knowledge that fulfillment of this vision is simultaneously so close – as close as God’s presence in our midst – and seemingly so far, as we humans choose again and again paths that lead away from understanding, justice, and peace. Today, as we celebrate the lives of all the saints who have led humanity towards fulfillment of God’s dream for creation, I’d like to talk about this vision because only by proclaiming it from the rooftops will we ever be able to help make God’s dream a reality.

Of course, to enter into this discussion, I’m going to start with something intensely nerdy. Star Trek.

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What We Mean When We Say ‘Love’

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Sermon for Sunday, October 29, 2023 || Proper 25A || Matthew 22:34-46

Today’s sermon is about love, and I’m going to throw in a few movie quotes to spice it up, okay? In this morning’s Gospel reading, a group of Pharisees gathers together and comes up with what they think is a doozy of a question to test Jesus. One of them (and here Matthew makes sure we know the questioner is a lawyer) asks Jesus, “Teacher, what commandment in the law is the greatest?”

Jesus doesn’t hesitate. He borrows from the book of Deuteronomy when he says, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’” Then Jesus takes this commandment to its logical conclusion: “This is the greatest and first commandment,” he says. “And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

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The God of Peace

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Sermon for Sunday, October 15, 2023 || Proper 23A || Philippians 4:1-9

In this week of bullets and bombs, of terror and retaliation, of so many dead in a part of the world that always seems one explosion away from the end, I began writing this sermon with zero words on my lips or in my heart. So I did what I always do in that situation. I read poetry, because poetry does not ask you to make sense of the world, only to see the world with new eyes that might, in time, retrain your heart towards beauty. I’m going to begin and end this sermon with poems and we’ll see how the middle shakes out.

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Living the Wisdom of the Ten Commandments

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Sermon for Sunday, October 8, 2023 || Proper 22A || Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20

Our first reading today from the book of Exodus recounts God speaking to Moses what we call the Ten Commandments. Whenever I read the Ten Commandments, I think of that great gag in Mel Brooks’s wildly inappropriate film History of the World, Part One, when Brooks, playing Moses, comes down the mountain with three tablets and says, “The Lord has given unto you these fifteen…” but then he drops a tablet and it shatters on the ground… “Ten! Ten Commandments!”

It’s pretty telling that this joke from an old movie is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about the commandments. To be honest, for a long time they weren’t all that central to my practice of Christianity. I’ve always known them in the same vague way that you sort of know the words to old folk songs – you can sing along with them, but probably not do a solo.

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The Mind of Christ

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Sermon for Sunday, October 1, 2023 || Proper 21A || Philippians 2:1-13

I’ve preached many, many times over the years about the famous words we heard this morning from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. Many biblical scholars regard these words about Christ’s descent to be one of us and his subsequent ascension as one of the first Christian hymns in existence. It’s an important passage that I’ve read over and over again, but this time a few words caught me that I hadn’t noticed before: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Another translation says, “Have the same mindset as Christ Jesus.” A third says, “Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus.”

That got me thinking. In what ways can we live into this mindset, this attitude of Christ? So, I’ve compiled a Top Ten list for this morning’s sermon. Each one of these deserves its own entire sermon, but instead of dwelling on one particular piece of the mind of Christ, I thought I’d share ten in the hopes that one or more will set a fire in you for further reflection and action. All right. Ready for the Top Ten ways to embrace the mindset of Christ?

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Generous Justice

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Sermon for Sunday, September 24, 2023 || Proper 20A || Matthew 20:1-16

This is one of those Gospel passages that leads to some very…spirited…discussions at Bible studies. There’s just something about this parable that rubs people the wrong way. We get all hung up on the fact that the various groups of workers in the vineyard don’t seem to be getting treated fairly. Some only work one hour, and they get the same pay as those who worked twelve hours! What?! We get stuck on that way of reading the parable and miss the larger point that Jesus is making. We miss the point that the generous vineyard owner keeps coming out and welcoming people into the vineyard all day long and treats even those who only had the opportunity to work one hour as if they had worked all day. That’s what the kingdom of heaven is like, says Jesus. 

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