Tag: God

We Will Serve the Lord

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Sermon for Sunday, November 12, 2023 || Proper 27A || Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25

I began my very first paid job when I was fifteen. I worked at the independent bookstore, which my mother managed. I served the customers by offering recommendations, ringing up their orders, and gift-wrapping their purchase. I loved that job. My second job was waiting tables at the Logan’s Roadhouse, which is one of those steak restaurants where customers are encouraged to throw their peanut husks on the floor. I served the guests by taking their orders, refilling drinks, and sweeping up those countless peanut shells. I did not love that job. I worked at Olive Garden as a busser, as a camp counselor, and as an assistant at my seminary’s teaching library. Then I got ordained and started serving as a priest. Serving in the church is the only, what I would call, “adult” job I’ve ever had.

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What We Mean When We Say ‘Love’

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Sermon for Sunday, October 29, 2023 || Proper 25A || Matthew 22:34-46

Today’s sermon is about love, and I’m going to throw in a few movie quotes to spice it up, okay? In this morning’s Gospel reading, a group of Pharisees gathers together and comes up with what they think is a doozy of a question to test Jesus. One of them (and here Matthew makes sure we know the questioner is a lawyer) asks Jesus, “Teacher, what commandment in the law is the greatest?”

Jesus doesn’t hesitate. He borrows from the book of Deuteronomy when he says, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’” Then Jesus takes this commandment to its logical conclusion: “This is the greatest and first commandment,” he says. “And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

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The God of Peace

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Sermon for Sunday, October 15, 2023 || Proper 23A || Philippians 4:1-9

In this week of bullets and bombs, of terror and retaliation, of so many dead in a part of the world that always seems one explosion away from the end, I began writing this sermon with zero words on my lips or in my heart. So I did what I always do in that situation. I read poetry, because poetry does not ask you to make sense of the world, only to see the world with new eyes that might, in time, retrain your heart towards beauty. I’m going to begin and end this sermon with poems and we’ll see how the middle shakes out.

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I Will Be With You

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Sermon for Sunday, September 3, 2023 || Proper 17A || Exodus 3:1-15

After such a heady and confusing sermon last Sunday, I thought today would be a good time for something completely different. About twice a year, I preach from the perspective of a character in the scripture. Today, I am going to be Moses. Please imagine with me Moses near the end of his life, talking to his protege Joshua, who is fretting about taking on the role of leader upon Moses’s death.

“I will be with you.” That’s what God promised me all those years ago. “I will be with you.” The memory is as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. God spoke to me, called me to my life’s work, and made me that singular promise: “I will be with you.”

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What We Mean When We Say “God”

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Sermon for Sunday, August 27, 2023 || Proper 16A || Matthew 16:13-20

I want to start today’s sermon off with a preemptive apology. I’m pretty sure it’s too early in the morning and too hot in here for the amount of heavy thinking I’m about to ask you to do. But I hope you will forgive me for the possible confusion I am about to place in your brains. This confusion has to do with what we mean when we say the word: “God.”

There are two big challenges that we must confront when we talk about what we mean when we say “God.” First, God, as a concept, is too big for us to define in a way that does not limit that which is, by definition, limitless. And second, we can only speak about God from our own perspective, which is narrowed by our particular identities and socialization. There is no way to speak about God without speaking from our collective stockpile of metaphors and stories.

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Mini-Sermons: “Lectionary Teaching” and “Irrevocable”

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Sermon for Sunday, August 20, 2023 || Proper 15A || Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32

This morning’s sermon is really two mini sermons stuck together – the first is a teaching about the way we read the Bible in church and the second is a look at today’s lesson from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. They teach you in seminary only to preach about one thing per Sunday, but I’m breaking that rule today because these two things fit together pretty well.

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Right Here

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Sermon for Sunday, August 13, 2023 || Proper 14A || Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-33

Out of all the characters in the Gospel, Peter has got to be the most relatable. At various points in the story, Peter is impetuous and confused and terrified and insightful and ignorant and, in today’s story, waterlogged. Across the narrative, Peter rarely comes off as a hero. I’ve always found Peter’s characterization fascinating because Peter was one of the most powerful people in the early church. If he had wanted to, he could have rewritten his own history to make himself appear more heroic. But he didn’t. He let the record stand, warts and all. This most powerful person in the early church shows up in the story of the Gospel as a regular guy, who’s stumbling around trying to follow Jesus, just like the rest of us.

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Scattering Seeds

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Sermon for Sunday, July 16, 2023 || Proper 10A || Matthew 13:1-19, 18-23

Jesus says some pretty strange stuff in the Gospel. At least this stuff is strange when we try to fit it into the way the world is instead of allowing these strange things to help us imagine a better world, a new world made more beautiful by the love, peace, and justice of God.

We try to ignore the strangeness because it’s Jesus saying these things, and we’ve had two thousand years to get used to them. But if we cast ourselves back into the sandals of those folks piled on the shore beside the sea, those folks listening to this weird, yet charismatic and compelling itinerant preacher, we hear the strangeness anew. And we realize that Jesus speaks like this because he’s trying to get people to shift their perspective, to see that new, more beautiful world.

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Laugh Tracking (Updated)

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Sermon for Sunday, June 18, 2023 || Proper 6A || Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7

Going to California this past week for my grandmother’s long-awaited funeral kept me from having as much time to write a sermon as I normally have. So I went back into my archives and guess what? The very first sermon I preached as an ordained priest fifteen years ago was for this particular Sunday. So I thought I’d bring it out of mothballs, dust it off, and share an updated version with you. The sermon is about laughter.

Now, when I was a little kid, I often told jokes that only made sense to me. My parents encouraged me to finish my jokes like Fozzie Bear, the hapless stand-up comic of the Muppets (you know, “Wocka, wocka!”). This told them it was time to laugh. My sense of humor and comic timing didn’t come into their own until my late teens.  So maybe that’s why I never employ the old sermon technique of beginning with a joke. I used to get laughs by making oblique references to my age, but I’m forty now, so I don’t think that’ll work anymore. Let’s try: “Back when I was born during the Reagan administration…”)

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The Wind Blows Where It Chooses

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Sermon for Sunday, May 28, 2023 || Pentecost A || Number 11:24-30; Acts 2:1-21

At the end of last Sunday’s sermon, I asked this question: “Where do you see God’s presence today?” We talked about recognizing the presence of God in big things like sunsets and star-strewn skies and little things like the veins of a leaf and our breath. Today, I’d like to follow up last week’s sermon with a very simple concept that I’m then going to talk about for ten minutes. The simple concept is this: God’s presence is everywhere, so we must be careful not to limit the places where we look for that presence.

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