Daunting Tasks

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Sermon for Sunday, December 24, 2023 || Advent 4B || Luke 1:26-38

(I was off yesterday, so no sermon from December 31st, but I preached two different sermons on December 24th. Last Monday, I posted the Christmas Eve sermon. Here’s the one for the Fourth Sunday of Advent.)

The reading we just heard from the Gospel According to Luke is one of my absolute favorite passages in the Gospel. I find the character of Mary so utterly compelling, so much a model for our inspiration. She only shows up a handful of times in the story, so let’s take this opportunity today to talk about Mary and about how her interaction with Gabriel sheds light on our lives.

The church calls the event of Gabriel coming to Mary the “Annunciation,” with a Capital A. This event gets its own feast day on March 25th (conveniently, exactly nine months before Christmas). Few events in the Bible have been painted more often by artists than the Annunciation. If I were laying out the story of the Gospel like a novel, then the Annunciation would be the Inciting Incident of the book because Mary’s “Yes” at the end of the passage sets in motion the rest of the events of the Gospel.

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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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2023 Christmas Pageant: Part of God’s Story

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This pageant takes the form of a bedtime picture book being read to a roomful of children. The story is the traditional Nativity story, but with one problem: the characters keep forgetting to appear! So the storyteller recruits the children to be part of the story God is telling. In the end, the whole assembly is invited to be part of God’s story.

In the beginning, God had a story to tell: the greatest story ever told, the story of Creation. And God began that story with four simple words: “Let there be light.” Everything God created was a character in the story: birds and bugs, land and lizards, fish and flowers, mammals and the moon. For untold generations, God’s story of Creation grew in the telling until a new group of characters entered the tale, characters who somehow knew the story was being told.

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Winning Christmas??

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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.

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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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Season Six of the Podcast for Nerdy Christians!

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I’ve been remiss over the last several weeks in not mentioning that Season Six of The Podcast for Nerdy Christians has been humming along since September. Carrie and I changed up the format a bit this season so it’s not quite as time-consuming to produce (namely, we dropped the book club part), so the episodes are shorter. So far this season we’ve talked about Doctor Who, Barbie, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Disney remakes, and Star Wars: Andor. With four more episodes to launch, I invite you to give a listen on your podcast app of choice. If you’ve never listened to the podcast before, Season Six is as good a place as any to start. But if your a completionist, then we suggest jumping back to Season 2 (and then if you really like it, Season 1 where we were still getting our sea legs, sort of like Star Trek: The Next Generation).

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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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