This is going to be something of a slippery sermon. It’s going to be slippery because I’m going to be skating a very fine line when I talk about the difference between human rules and God’s commandments. I’ll make sure to warn you when I get to the slippery part, but first let’s talk about why this is our sermon topic today.
Continue reading “Human Precepts and God’s Commands”
It has been about nine months since I preached a sermon about hope, so I think we’re due for one today. Hope is one of those slippery theological concepts because true, enduring hope differs from the more common Pollyanna-ish, reality-defying hope. But since we more often encounter the Pollyanna-ish hope, such a watered down version of hope tends to creep to the forefront of our minds. St. Paul, however, describes a much more hard-won hope, one that begins in suffering. And that’s the hope we’re going to talk about today. Also, a little bit of Calvin and Hobbes, but we’ll get to that in a minute or two.
Continue reading “Hope Does Not Disappoint Us”
Today is our Youth Sunday at St. Mark’s, and to celebrate we invited the Godly Play kids to ask me any questions they desired. We collected a list of twelve questions, ten of which are autobiographical in nature. We’ll run through those quickly. The last two are absolute theological doozies, so we’ll spend the bulk of this sermon tackling those two. Here we go with the first ten.
Continue reading “How Old is God? (and other questions)”
At the end of his second letter to the church in Corinth, St. Paul writes these memorable words of blessing: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” As we celebrate the Holy Trinity today, I’d like to focus on the three words that Paul associates with this fundamental truth of Creation: grace, love, and communion.
Continue reading “Grace, Love, Sharing”
Today we’re going to spend our entire sermon time talking about a single verse of the Gospel reading. John Chapter 14, Verse Six says: “Jesus said to [Thomas], “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” The first half of this verse is so beautiful and enlivening in its poetry. Then, to our modern ears, we hear the second half of the verse as terribly exclusive, as a complete barrier against anyone who is not Christian being able to gain access to God. So let’s wrestle with this verse this morning and see where we end up. We’ll start with the first half, this great “I Am” saying, and my hope is that the “I Am” statement will shine a new light on the second half of the verse.
Continue reading “John 14:6”
This sermon is about comfort zones, and specifically about how Jesus ejects us from our comfort zones. I was toying with the idea of making you all get up and sit in different seats, but I decided not to afflict you that much. Instead, I’m going to afflict you with another one of my lessons in ancient Greek. And we’ll start with today’s Gospel reading.
Continue reading “Driven Out”
This year I decided to preach this short homily before the reading of the Passion Gospel because I would like to offer you something to reflect on while you listen. I invite you to listen for the virtues that Jesus displays during this heartwrenching story, and I invite you to reflect on what virtues you live by without which you would not be able to recognize yourself. Don’t worry if you didn’t take that in just then; I’ll repeat the invitation at the end.
Continue reading “Virtues”
This is a sermon about baby donkeys. Well, really it’s a sermon about peace, but the thing you probably will remember about it is the baby donkey. Today, we celebrate an event in the life of Jesus, an event that was so momentous that it appears in all four accounts of the Gospel. At the beginning of the service, we read Matthew’s version of this event: Jesus’ triumphant ride into Jerusalem at the beginning of the week leading up to Passover. The way Jesus decides to enter the city demonstrates to the people of his own time and for people of all time Jesus’ conscious and dedicated embrace of nonviolence. And it all comes down to a baby donkey.
Continue reading “Baby Donkeys”
Only once in my life have I truly felt like a foreigner. It wasn’t on our honeymoon in South Africa because we were ensconced at a small game reserve the whole time. It wasn’t in Israel because I was there as a tourist doing touristy things. It wasn’t even when I visited Haiti because, though I stood out due to my pale skin, every Haitian I met made me feel like family. The only time I have ever felt like a foreigner was the first day of the second half of sixth grade when I walked into Mrs. Green’s social studies class at Hillcrest Middle School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
There were three things that marked me as a foreigner, an immigrant from the cold, distant land of New England. First, I was the new kid. Second, I did not know I was supposed to call my teacher, “Ma’am.” And third, I had a wicked Rhode Island accent. In a comedy of errors that is seared into my memory, when I needed a drink of water, I asked, “Can I go to the Bubbl-ah (Bubbler)?” It took about ten minutes to figure out I meant the water fountain, at which point I could only go if I addressed Mrs. Green as “Ma’am.”
Continue reading “Foreigners”
This sermon is about the cultivation of that wonderful gift of God known as curiosity. The older I get, the more I realize what I don’t know and the more I value curiosity. It’s strange. There seems to be an inverse relationship here. When I was younger, I should have been more curious, but I thought I knew way more than I did, so I did not cultivate curiosity. Now that I am edging into my mid-forties, my curiosity piques all the time. I get excited to learn new things, to explore topics that I never knew would interest me until I started digging into them. I love being curious.
Continue reading “How Can These Things Be?”
Where the Wind... 