Tag: compassion

Your Neighbor’s Cloak

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Sermon for Sunday, September 18, 2022 || Proper 20C || Jeremiah 8:18–9:1; Luke 16:1-13

That was a weird story I just read, wasn’t it? A really weird story. I’m not going to pretend I really get it. Some of the stuff Jesus says, I’m like, “Yep. Right there with you Jesus. Love my neighbor as myself. Got it.” But not this story. The parable of the dishonest manager is just a really confusing parable. And it’s perfectly okay for us to be confused by a passage in the Bible. If we understood everything the Bible said on our first read through, it would not hold the depths of truth that it does hold. So, it’s okay if I finished reading that parable and you were sitting there scratching your heads. I don’t really get it either.

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The Com-passion Gospel

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Sermon for Sunday, April 10, 2022 || Palm/Passion Sunday C || Luke 22:39 – 23:49

Today we begin Holy Week, our first one on-site here at St. Mark’s since 2019. The last two years we’ve had video presentations of the Passion Gospel, but this year we will hear it read live at the end of the service. The Passion Gospel tells the harrowing tale of Jesus’ arrest in the garden, his sham trial before the council and the Roman authorities, his enduring of the whipping and mocking, his slow walk to the site of his own execution, and finally, his death upon the cross. We call this story the Passion because the ‘passion’ comes from the word ‘suffering.’ We could just as easily call it the Compassion Gospel because in it Jesus does not just suffer in a vacuum; he suffers with and for the people he came to serve. I have to be clear here, though. Jesus’ suffering did not happen in order to fulfill the whims of a bloodthirsty God. His suffering happened because he would not abandon his people when his mission of love and justice ran into the fist of an oppressive empire.

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Intentions

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Sermon for Sunday, August 29, 2021 || Proper 17B || Mark 7:1-23

Every morning when I wake up, I meditate silently for a time, and then I pray a three-part intention for the day. I pray, “Dear God, I set my intention this day: to be at peace with all creatures, including myself; to have compassion for myself and others; and to set my heart on Christ.”

I pray this intention every single morning to ask God to help me address the day from a posture of peace and compassion as I follow the way of Jesus. My day begins like this to give me a better chance of putting peaceful and compassionate energy out into the world. No matter how important or unimportant we think we are, no matter how big or small our platform, no matter if we interact with many or few, every single day we change the world by our presence in it. The question is, how are we changing the world? Are we making it a better place to live or a worse one? Are we moving the world towards loving connections that promote peace, justice, and equity? Or are we pulling the world towards petty tribalism, mistrust, and competition? Each day, we have a choice, and I pray my intention to help me choose to add to the energy of life giving relationships, following the footsteps of Jesus.

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God’s Divine Math

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Sermon for Sunday, June 20, 2021 || Proper 7B || 2 Corinthians 6:1-13

They say that when a couple has a second baby, their hearts expand to love the second just as much as the first. The love is not divided in half, so that the older child now only gets 50% (although from that child’s perspective it might feel that way). Somehow, using the exponential property of divine mathematics, love always expands to include every beloved. Leah and I did not have the opportunity to experience this second child expansion because our second was born about 30 seconds after our first. We got the double whammy, and, in the moment the nurses placed both babies in my arms for the first time, I could feel in my heart my ability to love expand. All of a sudden, I had all this extra love inside me and it started leaking down my cheeks. For those first few sleep-deprived days, I spent hours just staring into the tiny faces of the babies. They were the physical embodiment of my heart opening wider than I thought possible.

This is the moment in my life that I think of when I read our lesson today from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. After speaking of all the hardships he has had to endure to remain in relationship with the churches he has founded, Paul says: “We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours. In return…open wide your hearts also.”

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The Cross of Compassion

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Sermon for Sunday, February 28, 2021 || Lent 2B || Mark 8:31-38

In less than a year, COVID-19 has killed 500,000 Americans. We passed that grim and horrifying milestone last week. Half a million Americans are being grieved by millions more. Half a million. I can barely conceive of that many people. It’s as if you went to Atlanta, Georgia and the entire city was suddenly empty. I almost didn’t write this sermon because I could not imagine what I could say in the face of such a statistic – a statistic tied to the very real lives and deaths of friends, families, neighbors, and strangers across this country.

But then I read today’s Gospel lesson in light of this grim reality. And this commonly read passage hit me in a new way, a way I had never seen before, a way that sheds light on how we might hold the reality of devastating loss as we also push forward to a different future than any of us expected.

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One Step Behind Jesus

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Sermon for Sunday, January 10, 2021 || Epiphany 1B || Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11

I was in the middle of exercising late Wednesday afternoon when I received panicked texts from a friend and from my mother at the same time. Do you see what’s going on at the Capitol right now? We are very shaken. Are you all okay? I immediately switched over from YouTube to live coverage on CBS and left it on until well past sundown, unable to tear my eyes away from the ugly spectacle. In one way, the events of Wednesday were shocking: after all, a hostile force has not breached the Capitol since the War of 1812. But in all other ways, Wednesday was the natural outcome of years of lies, incitement, manipulation, demagoguery, and (most pertinent for this sermon) heresy. That’s not a word I use very often, but it is important, especially in tumultuous times like these, to use the right words for things. I’ve been thinking and praying for three days about how to address the events of Wednesday in this sermon, and the only way I can wrap my head around them after so little time is to begin with the heresy on display this week and then counter it with Gospel.

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The Wisdom of Solomon

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Sermon for Sunday, August 19, 2018 || Proper 15b || 2 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14*

Today, I’d like to talk about wisdom. Wisdom is a gift from God that combines knowledge, discernment, and compassion to allow one to see deeply into the heart of things. Wisdom is the gift God gives to King Solomon in today’s first reading. And wisdom is desperately needed but in short supply in these strange and tumultuous days. Continue reading “The Wisdom of Solomon” →

Positive Presence

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Sermon for Sunday, January 21, 2018 || Epiphany 3B || Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:14-20

Each day, a thousand different choices confront us. Most are easy to navigate, and we do so without much thought. We might not even think of these as choices because we’ve made the correct choice so often that the incorrect one fades away. What do you do when you approach a stop sign? You stop, right? But there’s a hidden choice here. You could stop. You could choose to blow through the stop sign without even slowing down. Or you could perform the infamous rolling stop that got me caught twice by traffic cops when I was sixteen. Continue reading “Positive Presence” →