Tag: Christianity

Love Your Enemies

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Sermon for Sunday, February 23, 2025 || Epiphany 7C || Luke 6:27-38

(Content warning: I talk about the Holocaust in this sermon.)

Love your enemies. This is the most shocking thing Jesus says in the entire Gospel. Love your enemies. We read this and throw up our hands, thinking Jesus must have gone mad. How could we possibly do such a thing? The whole point of an enemy is that you don’t love them. Enemies are to be defeated and demeaned and destroyed, right? The history of our war torn world would say yes. But our savior says differently. Love your enemies, Jesus says. If we’re going to take Jesus seriously – take ALL of what he says seriously – then we need to wrestle with this command to love our enemies. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. What does it mean to love our enemies?

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Common Cause

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Sermon for Sunday, January 19, 2025 || Epiphany 2C || 1 Corinthians 12:1-11

Today’s sermon is about the Holy Spirit inspiring us to work for the common good. The word “common” is a word we use a lot in the Episcopal Church. Since the year 1549, our worship book has been called “The Book of Common Prayer.” This use of the adjective “common” embraces both of the word’s meanings. First, our prayer is “common” in that it is an everyday thing, a normal part of our routine. Walking to the bus is common. Eating a bowl of oatmeal is common. Washing the dishes is common. Second, our prayer is “common” in the sense of “shared together.” We hold things in common among people, like a shared fridge in an office. 

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Forty-Two

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Sermon for Sunday, January 12, 2025 || Epiphany 1C || Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

For this sermon, I’m going to do something a little different this morning. Today is my 42nd birthday, and if you’re even half the size nerd that I am, you know that the number 42 is a special one. In the strange and whimsical science fiction series The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. This answer was determined by the superest supercomputer that ever existed, but when the computer spit out the answer “42” no one could agree as to the content of the question that would result in such an answer. So now they had to figure out the question. The subtext of this very silly premise is that we (1) cannot outsource our own seeking and (2) we must never stop learning and growing.

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The Painting in Nazareth

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Sermon for Sunday, January 5, 2025 || Christmas 2 || Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23

This is a sermon about biblical role models. After the service, I would love to hear what character in the Bible inspires you like Joseph inspires me. So be thinking about for the next ten minutes while I talk.

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The Bedtime Story (Updated)

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Sermon for Tuesday, December 24, 2024 || Christmas Eve || Luke 2:1-20

Imagine with me a quiet moment when Jesus’ mother Mary and Mary Magdalene have gone for a walk together by the Sea of Galilee. The Ascension has come and gone, and they are missing Jesus. So Mary Magdalene asks his mother to tell her a story from Jesus’ childhood. Mary ponders for a moment and then begins:

As a boy, Jesus had trouble falling asleep. He wasn’t afraid of the dark or of monsters under his bed. He just had so much energy. Even a day full of running up hills and building rock forts couldn’t tire him out. When he couldn’t sleep, I would sing him a lullaby and run my fingers through his hair. Sometimes, after a few notes, he’d say, “Not tonight, Mama. Tell me the story instead.” The story. I was always glad when he asked me to tell him how he was born because, when the story remained silent in my heart, it always threatened to transform into a dream and vanish.

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The Christmas Pageant (Taylor’s Version)

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I wrote the dialogue and lyrics for this new Christmas Pageant, which kids from my church performed yesterday on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It was a blast! (And, obviously, despite the assertion in the first paragraph, the real Taylor didn’t help us – but her music did.) Here’s the video of the pageant, followed by the script.

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Decency

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Sermon for Sunday, December 15, 2024 || Advent 3C || Luke 3:7-18

On June 9, 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy sat in a hearing room and attacked a young lawyer named Fred Fisher for communist sympathies. Fisher was a member of Joe Welch’s law firm, and Welch did not take kindly to McCarthy bringing up Fisher, considering Welch had a deal with McCarthy’s own lawyer, Roy Cohn, that neither Fisher’s past nor Cohn’s own dubious history of missing the Korean War draft would be brought up at the hearing. But McCarthy could not help himself. And so Joe Welch spoke words that have gone down in history, thanks both to their televised nature and their puncturing of McCarthy’s indestructible aura. “Have you no sense of decency?” Welch asked. “At long last have you left no sense of decency?”

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Love and Good Deeds

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Sermon for Sunday, November 17, 2024 || Proper 28B || Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25

Every night at dinner at my house, my family shares a simple ritual before we say grace. We go around the table and say where we saw kindness that day. When Leah and I take our turns, our kindness is often that the other person made dinner. Many times, mine also come from people at this church whose kindness ripples out in a multitude of ways. Every kindness we share at dinner stems from a small, simple act, and each alone doesn’t seem like it amounts to much. But when we collect the kindnesses together, we add them, like stitches, to a great tapestry of goodness and love.

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God is Present

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Sermon for Sunday, November 3, 2024 || All Saints B || John 11:32-44

Here we are. November 3, 2024, the day we celebrate all the saints. We are two days before a momentous election that pits vastly different visions of this country against each other. The world is mired in the midst of multiple ongoing wars in which so many innocent people have died. We’re grappling with increasingly common and destructive natural disasters due to climate change. And on a personal level we are contending with issues ranging from physical and mental health to addictions to economic hardship to interpersonal relationships. Anxiety and stress are high. Time is fleeting. The future approaches, and we have no idea what it will hold. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been holding tension in my shoulders for so long that I don’t remember what it feels like to be relaxed.

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Listening Well

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Sermon for Sunday, October 27, 2024 || Proper 25B || Mark 10:46-52

This sermon is about the art of listening, specifically about how Jesus listens and how we can emulate his practice. Our ability to listen impacts every relationship we have: our spouses and families, our friends and neighbors, our church and community members, our political and ideological opponents, and our partners in God’s mission.

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