During my sabbatical, I’m not writing new sermons, so on Mondays I am choosing one post from every year of WheretheWind.com to highlight. In 2020, I preached the following sermon on Easter Sunday, less than a month into the Covid-19 pandemic.
Continue reading “Sabbatical Retrospective, Year 2020: Why Are You Weeping?”
During my sabbatical, I’m not writing new sermons, so on Mondays I am choosing one post from every year of WheretheWind.com to highlight. In 2019, I wrote notes each week of my first sabbatical, and this is one about my time at the Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
Continue reading “Sabbatical Retrospective, Year 2019: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice”
As I prepare to head off on sabbatical tomorrow, I’d like to use our sermon time today to talk about what I’m going to be doing and why. Ever since joining with a group of other local clergy two years ago to learn about faith-based community organizing, I have grown increasingly fascinated with storytelling. This may sound strange because I’ve been writing novels for a dozen years. But for some reason I’ve never linked being a writer with being a storyteller. I think this is because writing novels is a solitary experience, while storytelling happens in community. Faith-based community organizing coalesces around the stories people tell about themselves and their communities, their struggles and successes, their hopes and dreams and nightmares. These stories become the building blocks for specific justice-oriented actions that seek to improve the lives of everyone in the community.
Continue reading “The Stories We Tell”
In today’s sermon, we’re going to indulge in a bit of foolishness. Now, I’m aware that no one – myself included – likes to feel foolish. Feeling foolish quickly spirals into embarrassment, into red cheeks and hot faces, and we get the urge to escape as soon as possible. We all know the awful feeling of being laughed at instead of laughing with. (Though I have always loved Robin Williams’s line in the movie Dead Poets Society: “We’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing near you.”) We go to great lengths not to feel foolish, going so far as not to learn new skills in adulthood because we really don’t want to be bad at them when we’re starting out. This is why I can’t ice skate or hit my driver.
Continue reading “The Foolishness of God”
On this First Sunday in Lent, we always hear the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. If you’re wondering if you nodded off during the Gospel reading and missed the details of the temptations, don’t worry. You didn’t nod off. The Gospel According to Mark skips the details in favor of moving the story along quickly from one beat to the next. And that gives us the opportunity to focus on a different element of the story this morning. As Mark moves us swiftly past Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness, the Gospel writer tells us, “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
I’d like to spend our sermon time today breaking down this single sentence because there’s a lot in it. By the time we’re done, I hope you will have an understanding of the concept of “good news” as Jesus is using the term.
Continue reading “Trust This Good News”
In the Gospel, Jesus mentions that we can tell when summer is coming by the budding of the fig tree. He recognizes that we’re pretty good at figuring out what’s ahead. Arthritic knees feel the storm before it strikes. “We’ve got to talk” means Friday’s dinner date is off. Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning. If we humans are paying attention (even just a little bit), not much can slip by us.
Continue reading “Winning Christmas??”
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.
Continue reading “A Better World, with Help from Star Trek”
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.
Continue reading “The God of Peace”
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.
Continue reading “Generous Justice”
Every once in a while, I like to do what I call “nuts and bolts” sermons. These are teaching sermons about a particular element of our lives of faith, and today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans gives me the opportunity today to talk about a word we use a lot in the church, a word that I don’t think we understand very well. That word is “sin.”
Continue reading “The Distortion of Sin”
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