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.”
Continue reading “I Am Thirsty”
I need to apologize in advance for this sermon because it is going to be both theologically and grammatically dense. Today we’re going to talk about God’s response to Moses when Moses asks God what God’s name is. God has just given Moses his mission to bring the Israelites out of Egypt and lead them to the Promised Land. Moses is aware of his severe lack of credentials, so he says, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”
Continue reading “The Foundation of Being”
I know this is way out of sequence, but I forgot to post my Good Friday sermon back in April, and since we did not have a normal sermon for Trinity Sunday yesterday, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share what I said on Good Friday.
The Passion narrative we just heard can be quite overwhelming. It is by far and away the longest reading we listen to all year, and there’s a lot going on. So instead of talking about the entire Passion narrative, each year I like to focus on one little moment of it that speaks to the whole story. On this Good Friday, that moment happens right at the beginning of the story, so cast your minds back about ten minutes to the garden where Jesus is arrested.
Continue reading “Who Are You Looking For?”
(Part Two of Sermon Series on John 3:16 – Part One)
Last week we talked about God loving the kosmos – every nook and cranny of creation – into being. We focused on the first six words of John 3:16. “For God so loved the world.” The next few words tell us what God does because God loves the world. And that’s what we’re going to focus on today.
For God so loved the world that God gave…
Let’s just pause there for a minute. Let’s pause on that verb “gave” and appreciate the truth that Jesus shares about God. God loved creation so much that God gave. God’s love propels God’s gift-giving. This giving expects nothing in return. This giving is free, not earned or purchased. This giving is an outpouring of God’s love, which is the only thing God’s love ever does. God’s love pours out; it spills from a wellspring that never runs dry; it gushes up like living water, bringing new life to creation.
Continue reading “That God Gave God’s Only Son…”
This sermon is about the danger of fundamentalism, but it’s going to take me a few minutes to get there. I need to start like this: something’s going on in the Church in Corinth. We don’t know exactly what because we only have Paul’s side of the story. But we know that within a few years of its founding, fractures have appeared between the church’s members. Later in the letter, Paul references a few issues that divide the people: issues around what to eat, issues around who is most important in the church, and issues around which spiritual gifts are the best. Paul addresses all of these before culminating in his great poem about love – you know, “Love is patient, love is kind,” etc.
But here at the beginning of the letter, Paul talks about another type of division that goes beyond the ideological. Paul has heard that the members of the Church in Corinth are assigning themselves to camps based on certain individuals. There’s Paul. There’s Apollos, who was another church planter in Paul’s orbit. There’s Cephas – that’s Simon Peter. And there’s Christ.
Okay, I’m going to get in the weeds here for a minute. Fair warning. I promise it’s important.
Continue reading “I am of Paul”
God created us to be beings of love and trust. We all start out that way, at least, but pretty soon the world teaches us a lesson I wish we all had the opportunity to unlearn. The world teaches us to fear, to be afraid of so many parts of life. This makes sense, because the world contains a lot of frightening things. When I was a kid we did not have active shooter drills in school like my children do now. Then the massacre at Columbine happened my sophomore year of high school, and school shootings have been a terrifying element of American society ever since. This fear is ever-present in my mind when I drop my kids off at school, hovering right below the resurgent pandemic.
Fear has a way of debilitating us, of shrinking us down and holding us hostage. Thinking about fear this week, I also had in my mind Jesus’ words from the Gospel lesson I just read. Those words started seeping into my consciousness. And I noticed that Jesus had sidled up right next to my fears and made them seem very small in comparison.
Continue reading “Fear and Trust”
During the first six months of the pandemic, I wrote six new songs to be sung during the livestreamed worship at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Mystic, CT. I’ve collected them into this EP.
Continue reading “I’ll Go Before You: A Pandemic EP”
The Samaritan woman leaves her water jar behind, rushes back to the city, and says to anyone who will listen, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” That’s a pretty astounding statement given the conversation she has just had with Jesus by the well. Many biblical scholars chalk it up to her excitement – the exaggeration is forgivable because of the encounter she just had with the Messiah. Others say that, given her station, she needs to exaggerate in order to be taken seriously. I think both of those ideas miss the point of the story entirely because they start from the premise that the woman is not being a reliable witness, is not simply telling the truth.
Continue reading “Everything I Have Ever Done”
My family moved around a lot when I was a kid. Before the age of twelve I had lived in eight different houses in five states. When we arrived in Alabama right after Christmas in 1994, my parents promised my sister and me that we wouldn’t move again until I finished high school seven years on. I smiled and nodded, but the whole time I was thinking, “Yeah, right. I’ll believe that when I see it.”
I simply had no frame of reference for remaining in one place more than three years, which was my previous best. I wasn’t great at making friends because my experience told me I would be leaving them soon, so what was the point. I had to adapt to numerous new cultures and speaking patterns. Notably, when I moved to Alabama I had to amend every statement with the words “sir” or “ma’am.” If I had said either in my prior home of Rhode Island, adults would have thought I was sassing them. It was very confusing. Continue reading “God’s Abiding Presence”
Way back in Chapter Four of the Gospel According to John, we hear Jesus use a particular phrase for the first time. The phrase is special for it links Jesus’ identity to the divine identity of God. This one little phrase is just two words long, with only three letters among them. The phrase is “I Am.” In Chapter Four, Jesus says these special words to the Samaritan woman at the well. They’ve had a long talk about living water and where to worship, and their conversation ends with Jesus revealing to her his divine identity, saying, “I Am.”
These two little words reveal his divine identity because of their link to a famous passage in the book of Exodus, in which Moses meets God in the burning bush. God gives Moses the mission to free the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. To gain some credibility, Moses asks to know God’s name. “I Am Who I Am,” says God. Jesus echoes this name many, many times in the Gospel of John, beginning first with the Samaritan woman. Continue reading “I Am. I Am Not.”
Where the Wind... 