Tag: Christianity

The Fabric of Faith

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Sermon for Sunday, October 5, 2025 || Proper 22C || 2 Timothy 1:1-14

This sermon is about community, about resisting the pull of isolation, especially in an age when we are all too often isolated from one another due to many and varied forces. The community we share in the church, when practiced at its beloved best, is the weave of the fabric of faith, into which God stitches our individual threads. Today I’d like to celebrate this weaving of beloved community and talk about how such weaving can, with God’s help, heal the world.

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I am Ashamed to Beg

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Sermon for Sunday, September 21, 2025 || Proper 20C || Luke 16:1-13

The parable Deacon Chuck just read is, admittedly, very confusing. But one thing the dishonest manager says leapt out to me this week, and that’s what we’re going to focus on today. After his boss is getting ready to fire him, the manager says, “What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.”

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Sin and Salvation

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Sermon for Sunday, September 14, 2025 || Proper 19C || 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

Today we’re going to talk about sin and salvation. We’re going to talk specifically about two ways of looking at salvation, one which is more helpful for our lives of faith than the other. I’ll get to these two ways in a minute, but first I want to talk about Jesus’ response to the Pharisees and scribes in this morning’s Gospel reading.

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My Precious

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Sermon for Sunday, September 7, 2025 || Proper 18C || Luke 14:25-33

The Gospel lesson Deacon Chuck just read for us contains one of Jesus’ more inflammatory statements: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” We’re going to unpack this inflammatory statement today, but first I want to tell you all about a person named Sméagol.

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Learning to Sing

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Sermon for Sunday, August 24, 2025 || Proper 16C || Jeremiah 1:4-10

Today we are going to talk about inadequacy. Specifically we are going to talk about how God calls people, not in spite of, but because of their inadequacies. This pattern holds throughout Holy Scripture, but we’ll get into that later. First, a personal story.

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Practice the Presence of God

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Sermon for Sunday, August 17, 2025 || Proper 15C || Hebrews 11:29 – 12:2

Today, I’m going to talk about faith. I’m going to talk about faith for two reasons. First, our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews invokes faith several times and I’d like to explore that with you. And second, over the course of my four weeks off, I discerned the need to recommit myself to some spiritual disciplines in order to exercise my faith. At the end of today’s sermon, I will invite you to do the same. But first, let’s define our terms.

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The Flow of God’s Love

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Sermon for Sunday, June 29, 2025 || Proper 8C || Galatians 5:1,13-25

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

St. Paul says that this commandment sums up the whole law. Jesus says that this commandment, along with the command to love God, makes up all the law and the prophets. The command to love one’s neighbor as one’s self is central to the daily lives of Jesus’ followers – from his first disciples all the way down to us. So let’s talk about this commandment today, about what it means for us and how we might live it out in our own lives.

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Nine Pieces of the Spirit

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Sermon for Sunday, June 8, 2025 || Pentecost C || Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17, 25-27

Today, on this Feast of Pentecost, we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the gathering of Jesus’ first followers. And we celebrate the Spirit’s continued movement in our lives. The Spirit moves in so many ways that we might easily miss how the Spirit is present with us. So I’d like to take this sermon to talk through in brief nine ways we encounter the Holy Spirit. You have a handy bookmark in your program to help you remember the nine ways. Also, as a reminder of the Spirit’s presence among this gathering, we are going to map these nine ways of encountering the Holy Spirit upon the beautiful piece of stained glass art by our own Alison Ives that will hang above the altar for the next six months.

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I Am Thirsty

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Sermon for Friday, April 18, 2025 || Good Friday || John’s Passion

Here we are on Good Friday. We’ve just heard the Passion Gospel, a reading of such overwhelming depth and consequence that we have trouble taking in the whole thing at once. So my practice each year on Good Friday is to take a single moment of the Passion and dwell with it. Today, this moment happens when Jesus, hanging from the cross, says, “I am thirsty.”

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All Things New

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Sermon for Sunday, May 18, 2025 || Easter 5C || Revelation 21:1-6

Today’s sermon is about newness, and it springs from the reading from Revelation in which God says, “Look! I’m making all things new.” We’re going to dig into the concept of newness and celebrate our opportunity to be renewed again and again, while also recognizing that everything new is made up of everything old.

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