Tag: Faith

Psalms of Uncertainty

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Sermon for Sunday, May 16, 2021 || Easter 7B || Psalm 1

Human beings do not particularly like ambiguity. We want good data. We need to know where we stand. We crave certainty. The trouble is, there’s no such thing as certainty and the ground tends to shift beneath our feet and even data is often skewed by the biases of the collectors. And still, we have this elemental desire (unreasonable as it may be) for everything to fall into perfect categories so that we can understand our place in all of this.

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Grasshoppers

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Sermon for Sunday, February 7, 2021 || Epiphany 5B || Isaiah 40:21-31

This morning we read my absolute favorite passage from the book of the Prophet Isaiah, and I can’t let it slip by without preaching on it. This passage touches on a common element of the spiritual life that I don’t think gets enough press because people don’t particularly enjoy sharing their doubts. See if this sounds familiar.

You’re pumping gas or flossing your teeth or washing your hair or doing any sort of mundane activity. The numbers tick by on the gas pump, and your mind wanders. And for some reason, you have a sudden and unbidden attack of existential doubt. Has that ever happened to you? One minute you’re thinking about your grocery list, and the next your heart drops into your stomach, and you shake your head a little and you narrow your eyes and you look up at the sky and you say, “Why do you care about me, Lord?” 

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The Garden and the Wasteland (updated)

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Sermon for Sunday, January 3, 2021 || Christmas 2 || Luke 2:41-52

They say that every therapist should be in therapy. Likewise, every priest should participate in spiritual direction. Without trained professionals helping us pastors notice God’s movement in our lives, one of two things happens. We either forget to rely on God, thus emptying ourselves of all nourishment even though a feast is perpetually spread before us. Or we decide we don’t need to rely on God, because we are doing just fine on our own (thank you very much!) and the same starvation results. We pastors are a rather thick bunch, usually quite stubborn when faced with the Almighty, because the Creator-of-All-That-Is rarely seems to fit the predictions of our seminary studies.

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Season 3 of the Podcast for Nerdy Christians

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In August 2019, Carrie Combs and I launched the Podcast for Nerdy Christians, and we’ve had a blast ever since sharing discussions at the intersection of our faith and our nerdiness. Sometimes we joke that we created the podcast so we could talk about all the nerdy things that we can’t fit into our sermons. Then again, I recently talked about Stranger Things in a sermon, to go along with my copious Star Wars references.

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I Don’t Know (Third Base!)

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Sermon for Sunday, September 27, 2020 || Proper 21A || Matthew 21:23-32

There are a lot of contenders for most famous comedy routine of all time. There’s Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch or perhaps, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” There’s the cheeseburger skit from the early days of Saturday Night Live. There’s George Carlin’s seven words you can never say on TV (which are also words I won’t say in a sermon). But they all fall short of one comedy routine, the absolute pinnacle: the baseball routine of Abbott and Costello, commonly called “Who’s on first.” The Yankees have some players with very strange names, and as Abbott teaches the players to Costello, Costello gets increasingly confused and frustrated.

Abbott begins by telling him the infielders: “Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know’s on third.”

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The God Who Sees

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Sermon for Sunday, June 21, 2020 || Proper 7A || Genesis 21:8-21

Today, I’d like to talk about Hagar. Specifically, I’d like to talk about Hagar’s vision and how God grants us the same capacity for faithful seeing that Hagar has. First, though, you might be wondering who Hagar is. Hagar is an Egyptian servant (or slave) in the household of Abram and Sarai (who during the course of the Genesis story have their names changed to Abraham and Sarah). When God promises Abram that God will give Abram countless descendants, the old couple don’t know what to do. They’ve never had children of their own, and now they’re way too old. Taking God’s promise into her own hands, Sarai offers her servant Hagar to Abram, saying, “It may be that I shall obtain children by her.” (If this sounds eerily like The Handmaid’s Tale, it is.)

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Into Your Hands

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Sermon for Sunday, May 10, 2020 || Easter 5A || Psalm 31

It really got to me this week – the isolation, the distance. One day, I got home a little before dinnertime. Leah gave me a hug, and I realized it was the first time that day someone had touched me. I had been feeling agitated all day, and in that moment I knew why. My primal need for physical contact had not been met. What a relief it was to go home to someone who would embrace me. Then I thought about all the people, those I know and love and those I don’t know and am still called to love, who haven’t touched another human being in two months. I couldn’t even make it a day! So when I read our lessons for today, one verse of the psalm leapt off the page:

Into your hands I commend my spirit,
for you have redeemed me,
O Lord, O God of truth.

Into your hands. I talk about God’s hands all the time. Every single time I pray for someone who is sick, I end the prayer with, “May God hold you in the palm of God’s hand.” I love to sing the Irish blessing, which ends in a similar fashion: “May God hold you in the hollow of God’s hand.” For a long time, I’ve been inviting other people to see themselves as being held in this loving grip. For some reason, I hadn’t seen myself as being held there. 

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The Threefold Voice

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Sermon for Sunday, May 3, 2020 || Easter 4A || John 1:1-10

I imagine Jesus looking out over the fields beyond Jerusalem and seeing shepherds moving their flocks towards the sparse patches of green in the distance. He turns to his followers and says, “You see those shepherds out there. I am the Good Shepherd.” Then he begins spinning out his metaphor, telling a story as the people watch the grazing sheep beneath the big, open sky. The shepherd goes into the fold,” Jesus continues, and “the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.”

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New Questions

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Sermon for Sunday, March 8, 2020 || Lent 2A || John 3:1-17

We humans have a tendency to fall into patterns. Sometimes these patterns are life-giving, like eating healthy and exercising. Too often, our patterns are destructive, especially on a societal level: we do the same things over and over and wonder why we achieve the same results – results that do not promote justice and dignity for all. Now, our loving God invites us into the fullness of life, which will not happen until such fullness is available to all people and all creation. But when we keep arriving at the same set of answers that do not lead to fullness of life for all, we need to start asking different questions.

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Cloud of Witnesses

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Sermon for Sunday, August 18, 2019 || Proper 15C || Hebrews 11:29–12:2

One of the great honors of my profession as an ordained pastor is the opportunity to preside at funerals. As a matter of fact, we had one here yesterday for longtime parishioner Bill Everett. Some funerals carry the weight of incredible sorrow; others buzz with palpable celebration. Most hold both sorrow and celebration in tandem, as the two are not enemies but rather both are sincere expressions of love. As I prepare for a funeral, and especially as I write the homily, I find my thoughts drawn to the eternal nature of the love of God, which God made tangible and so very present in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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