Here is the yearly iteration of my Christmas Day sermon/song. It is a musical rendition of parts of John 1 and Luke 1-2. I absolutely love singing it, and it is the highlight of my Christmas worship every year. This is the first time I have recorded the song since 2012.
Continue reading “A Bard’s Christmas Song”
One of the unique things about the Gospel according to Luke is how concerned the text is with setting, with time and place. Several times, Luke tells us when and where the events are happening. You’ve all heard an example of this tendency a million times: “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”
Why do we care that this registration happening while Quirinius was governor of Syria? The ancient world did not have reliably standardized calendars, so to date an event, one reliable way was to delve into Roman records. Rome was an empire, and if there’s one thing the Roman Empire did better than oppressing nations it conquered, it was record-keeping. So Luke uses the information available to date the birth of Jesus, and so this Quirinius guy had his named immortalized in the best-selling book of all time.
Continue reading “Rightside Up Again”
At the end of this sermon, I’m going to talk about the movie Frozen II. But first let’s talk about fear. Whenever an angel of the Lord appears in Holy Scripture, the angel always begins the message for the same four words: “Do not be afraid.” Today’s Gospel lesson is no exception. Mary’s fiancé Joseph has resolved to “dismiss her quietly” because of her pregnancy, but he takes one more night to sleep on the decision. During that night, an angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream and says, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”
Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. My question is: Why would Joseph be afraid to do this? I can think of many reasons for Joseph’s fear, and I want to talk about three of them this morning. We’ll dispense with the first two quickly because the third is where I really want us to focus.
Continue reading “Beyond Fear”
You’re going to get sick of me saying this, but it has fascinated me for years, so I will say it again. Jesus almost never answers the questions people ask him. I know I started my sermon a few weeks ago with this same thought, but it’s so important for understanding how Jesus related to people in the Gospel. Jesus responds to questions, but he rarely answers them. When we take the time to compare his response to the thing the questioner was looking for, we see more clearly the path Jesus invites us to walk.
Continue reading “New Reality”
About ten minutes into The Princess Bride, we meet Vizzini, Fezzek, and Inigo. The three brigands kidnap Princess Buttercup and set sail across the sea to another country, where the giant Fezzek scales the imposing Cliffs of Insanity with the other three strapped to him. All the while, the Man in Black has been chasing them, but Vizzini dismisses their pursuer, saying it would be “inconceivable” that anyone would have known they kidnapped the princess in the first place. And yet the Man in Black starts climbing the cliffs after them. “Inconceivable” says Vizzini again. Vizzini cuts the rope, and the Man in Black hangs onto the rocks: “He didn’t fall? Inconceivable!” The Spanish blademaster Inigo Montoya looks at Vizzini and says one of the more quotable lines in a film full of quotable lines: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
That line from one of my all-time favorite movies always comes to mind when I read today’s Gospel lesson because John the Baptist uses a word, a very special word, and I do not think it means what our society thinks it means.
Continue reading “Change Your Hearts and Lives”
No sermon this week, as the intern at St. Mark’s had the reins for First Sunday of Advent. So I thought I’d share something I wrote a few weeks ago at a youth revival/retreat weekend. After hearing a talk given by one of the teens, we had about half an hour to compose a rap in response. This is the text of the one I shared with the group.
Continue reading “30 Minute Rap”
I offered the following reflection on St. Mark’s All Souls Day services on November 2, 2019. I wrote most of it several years ago and have used pieces of it here and there, but I have not published the entire reflection until now.
During the next few minutes, I would like to share with you four images. I invite you to imagine these images as I describe them. Each one illustrates a facet of the impact of grief on our lives, something that grief does for us, something that grief is. Perhaps you will resonate with one or more of these images. Perhaps, the four that I describe will spur you to discern your own image for grief. I hope you will, because grief is an intensely personal thing, which makes it one of the hardest things to share. By trying to describe grief, we can give ourselves some language with which to talk about it, and thus find, in some small, yet meaningful ways, the ability to share it with others.
Continue reading “Four Images of Grief”
Sermon for Sunday, November 17, 2019 || Proper 28C || Luke 21:5-19
Imagine with me the words of the Apostle Peter, spoken to his young cellmate on the eve of Peter’s death in the city of Rome around the year 64 A.D.
I heard about the great fire that swept through Rome, and I knew immediately that the authorities would blame us Christians. That’s why I came here – to support the community I knew would face persecution. And now here I am, arrested for arson – this is my fourth arrest, by the way – and I wasn’t even here at the time of the blaze. But facts don’t matter to those in power. Only keeping their power matters to them.
Continue reading “I Will Give You Words”
I’ve said it many times, and I’ll say it again. Jesus rarely, if ever, answers the questions people ask him in the Gospel. Instead, he answers the questions he wishes they had asked. Today’s Gospel lesson is a case in point.
Jesus does not answer the Sadducees question because their question is disingenuous. They ask him a question designed to expose what they think is the absurdity of the resurrection. However, since they don’t believe in the resurrection, they really have no standing to ask a question about it. They are simply trying to get Jesus to trip into a bad sound bite. They have focus-group-tested a stumper, and they deploy it to make Jesus look bad.
Continue reading “Engage, Expand, Reach Deeper”
The only person you can change is yourself.
Recently, I began a practice of silent meditation every morning. For twenty minutes, I sit cross-legged on the center cushion of my couch, and I breathe the prayer-word “Maranatha,” which means “Come, Lord Jesus.” I decided to build this practice into my spiritual life because I felt myself changing for the worse. The culture of immediacy had captured me with its constant need for updating feeds. The tough subjects I was (and am) tackling in my person study didn’t have a space to go inside me because I was too cluttered with other, incompatible ideas. I talked about God so much that I had forgotten simply to dwell with God.
And most perniciously, with the rising tide of negativity, hate, indignity, and disrespect in our society, I could feel these evil chemicals starting to build up in my system. In silence, God and I can purge them together, and I can feel the treatment beginning to gain ground on the disease.
Continue reading “Play Your Game, Not Theirs”
