Tag: justice

Trust This Good News

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Sermon for Sunday, February 18, 2024 || Lent 1B || Mark 1:9-15

On this First Sunday in Lent, we always hear the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. If you’re wondering if you nodded off during the Gospel reading and missed the details of the temptations, don’t worry. You didn’t nod off. The Gospel According to Mark skips the details in favor of moving the story along quickly from one beat to the next. And that gives us the opportunity to focus on a different element of the story this morning. As Mark moves us swiftly past Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness, the Gospel writer tells us, “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

I’d like to spend our sermon time today breaking down this single sentence because there’s a lot in it. By the time we’re done, I hope you will have an understanding of the concept of “good news” as Jesus is using the term.

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Generous Justice

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Sermon for Sunday, September 24, 2023 || Proper 20A || Matthew 20:1-16

This is one of those Gospel passages that leads to some very…spirited…discussions at Bible studies. There’s just something about this parable that rubs people the wrong way. We get all hung up on the fact that the various groups of workers in the vineyard don’t seem to be getting treated fairly. Some only work one hour, and they get the same pay as those who worked twelve hours! What?! We get stuck on that way of reading the parable and miss the larger point that Jesus is making. We miss the point that the generous vineyard owner keeps coming out and welcoming people into the vineyard all day long and treats even those who only had the opportunity to work one hour as if they had worked all day. That’s what the kingdom of heaven is like, says Jesus. 

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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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I Will Give You Rest

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Sermon for Sunday, July 9, 2023 || Proper 9A || Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

This is a sermon about rest. The concept of rest is on my mind because one week from today, after church services, lemonade on the lawn, and premarital counseling, I will be on vacation for three weeks. I will be able to rest in a way that I’m unable to do for the bulk of the year. While I will miss you all, I am really looking forward to my vacation. At the same time, thinking of vacation as the only time to rest is not a great way to maintain a healthy, balanced life. God built rest into the very fabric of creation, and everyone (me more than most) can learn from creation’s example.

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NIMBY and the Reign of Christ

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Sermon for Sunday, November 20, 2022 || Reign of Christ C || Jeremiah 23:1-6

Today is the final Sunday of the church year, the day on which we celebrate the Reign of Christ. Next week, we begin a new church year with the season of Advent. Both today’s event and the season of Advent share a similar theological lens. They both celebrate a present reality that is always happening AND a future reality that fulfills or completes the present one, a future reality that we long for and hope for, but has not yet come to pass. 

We tend to shorten these two realities into two camps: the “already” and the “not yet.” The upcoming season of Advent is a time when we celebrate the constant presence of Christ (that’s the “already”) while we also wait in hope for the second coming of Christ (that’s the “not yet”). And today, on this day we celebrate the Reign of Christ, we recognize God’s kingdom as the ever-present reality undergirding all of Creation (that’s the “already”) while we also recognize the continual need to partner with God to make that reality even more present across our broken world (that’s the “not yet”).

Today is also the day where the Greater New London Clergy Association, a group of several dozen pastors, priests, and rabbis from the region, (we all) decided to preach on the same topic – the housing crisis in Southeastern Connecticut. So I thought to myself: how am I going to talk about the housing crisis and about the Reign of Christ in the same sermon? And the answer hit me very quickly. The biggest obstacle to solving the housing crisis is also something that runs absolutely counter to the Reign of Christ.

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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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Comforting Words / Challenging Words

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Sermon for Sunday, August 14, 2022 || Proper 15C || Luke 12:49-56

There’s an old saying in church that Jesus came to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” We see this throughout the gospel when Jesus cares for and lifts up those on the margins of his society while at the same time denouncing the excesses and abuses of those in power. Jesus comforts and challenges in equal measure, depending on the needs and station of his subject.

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Listen to My Voice

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Sermon for Sunday, May 8, 2022 || Easter 4C || John 12:22-30

Two weeks ago in our Gospel reading, we heard Jesus say, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Last week Jesus told Simon Peter (and by extension, us the readers) “Follow me.” And today, we hear him say something else from earlier in the Gospel. He has just talked all about being the Good Shepherd, who calls the sheep by name, who brings the sheep out of the sheepfold, who lays down his life for the sheep. And then he says this. He says, “My sheep listen to my voice.”

The trouble for people reading or hearing the Gospel way back then is the same trouble we have today. None of them and none of us have ever audibly heard Jesus say anything. And yet, we follow. We believe. We listen. The question we’re going to ponder together for the next few minutes is “How.” How do we listen to Jesus’ voice? How do we listen to someone who lived nineteen centuries ago and who inhabited the other side of the world and who spoke a language that no longer exists?

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Unlearn What You Have Learned

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Sermon for Sunday, April 3, 2022 || Lent 5C || Philippians 3:4b-14

Last week we talked about beginning again. I want to stay with that theme this week and talk about a fundamental piece of beginning again. This fundamental piece is the action of “unlearning.” Sometimes we learn something wrong (or at least incompletely), and we operate under that wrongness so long that it seems right due only to longevity. When we recognize this, the mature step is to unlearn what we have learned, and this means beginning again.

When I was writing this sermon, I accidentally quoted Yoda in what I just said, so I figure I might as well just present the whole scene from The Empire Strikes Back to set up this sermon. (I haven’t used any Star Wars references yet this year!) Luke Skywalker is deep in his training with Master Yoda on the planet of Dagobah. Luke is doing a handstand while levitating rocks, but then R2-D2 whistles a warning, and Luke loses his concentration. Artoo was warning him that his X-Wing starfighter is sinking completely into the swamp.

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I Contain Multitudes

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Sermon for Sunday, February 13, 2022 || Epiphany 6C || Luke 6:17-26

There is a very silly scene in the very silly movie Life of Brian by Monty Python. Actually, the movie is fairly deep, but you have to dig through the silliness to find its depth. The movie follows Brian, a person unfortunate enough to have been born in the stable next to Jesus. In the silly scene near the beginning of the film, the camera pans away from Jesus speaking his famous Beatitudes; you know, blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers, etc. The camera pans away from Jesus and settles on a group of people way at the back of the crowd, who are struggling to hear Jesus.

“What was that?” one man says.

“I think it was, ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers,’” another replies.

“What’s so special about the cheesemakers?” a third asks.

The first man responds, “Well, obviously, it’s not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.”

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