Sermon for Sunday, March 17, 2024 || Lent 5B || John 12:20-33
I’ve always wondered what was on Jesus’ mind as he approached the last week of his earthly life. I wonder this because we face challenging times too, and imagining our way into the mind of Christ can help us navigate the necessary hardships of life. So today, let’s imagine our way into Jesus’ thoughts spurred by today’s Gospel passage. And then at the end, we’ll come back to our own thoughts as we face challenging times.
Jesus has just rode into Jerusalem on the back of the donkey. The crowds waved branches of palm and caused quite a ruckus during the parade. When he dismounts, two of his disciples, Philip and Andrew, bring some visitors to meet him. They are Greeks, who are in Jerusalem for the festival of Passover. Somehow, Jesus knows that these Greeks are the sign that his earthly ministry is almost at an end. Word of Jesus’ movement has spread far and wide. And the stunning thing about this movement is that it wasn’t designed to replace one empire with another. Above all else, Jesus yearns for people to be free – to be free to choose the light, to walk in the light, to be the light that shines on the Truth that sets free.
Sermon for Sunday, March 10, 2024 || Lent 4B || John 3:14-21
When I went to high school football games as a kid in Alabama, people were always holding up signs that said, “John 3:16.” Not the words of the verse, just the citation, which was almost something of a brand in and of itself. “John 3:16” signs were everywhere. Years later while in seminary, I became a scholar of the Gospel of John. And I had this silly desire to head back to my high school, go to a football game, and hold up a sign that said, “John 3:17.” Perhaps, the person next to me would ask me why my sign was wrong and I could say that the sign wasn’t wrong, but a different verse entirely. The verse after the most famous verse of the Bible says, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” This sermon starts with 3:17 and moves into the verses that follow it as we contemplate walking in darkness and walking in light.
“You are the light of the world.” Jesus says these words to his disciples as a great crowd listens in to his teaching that we now commonly call “The Sermon on the Mount.” You are the light of the world. In John’s account of the Gospel, Jesus says, “I am the Light of the World”, but here in Matthew, he’s not talking about himself. He’s talking to his followers and to the readers of the Gospel and (a few thousand years later) to us.
You are the light of the world. And Jesus keeps going with two more images – the city on the hill and the lamp on the lampstand – as things that, like the light, should never be hidden. And then he says, to make sure everyone understands his meaning: “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”
Sermon for Sunday, February 9, 2020 || Epiphany 5A || Matthew 5:13-20
“You are the light of the world.” Just let that sink in for a moment. It’s an astounding claim that Jesus makes. “Let your light shine before others,” he says, “so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” Let your light shine. We remember so many of the commandments Jesus gave us: Love God with all your heart, love your neighbor as yourself, love one another as I have loved you, go into all the world and preach the Gospel. And here is another commandment of Jesus hidden in the midst of the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount. Let your light shine before others.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” These words from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are the only adequate ones I can find to say this morning in the wake of the white supremacist terrorist attack on two Muslim mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on Friday. After writing that sentence yesterday morning, I stared at my computer screen for a long, long time because I had no adequate words of my own to add. All I have left are the inadequate ones, written through the fog of my own tears.
Sermon for Sunday, March 3, 2019 || Last Epiphany C || Exodus 34:29-35
There are people in our lives who so fully embrace the love of God that we can’t help but feel closer to God when we’re around them. They live and breathe the Way of Love so fully that half a smile or a touch on the shoulder or a quick word is more than enough for you to reorient yourself on that Way of Love as well. God has blessed me with relationships with a few such people over the years, and I’ve noticed they all have one thing in common – one thing that makes their connection to God’s love even more special. They have no idea just how amazing their connection is. If you compliment them for their incredible generosity of spirit or their welcoming manner, they will wave away the comment as undeserved. Or they will shine the compliment back on you because they have no desire to stand in the limelight.
The twelve days of Christmas have come and gone bringing us to an often overlooked feast day of the church. Today we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, the coming of the Wise Men, the Magi, to the Christ child. Then we have a long stretch of Sundays between now and Ash Wednesday in which we hear the stories of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. And at the end of the season of the church year that follows today, we find ourselves standing on the mountain with the disciples Peter, James, and John.
Sermon for Sunday, March 18, 2018 || Lent 5B || John 12:20-33
Imagine with me the thoughts of Jesus that might have been swirling around in his head during the day of the Gospel passage I just read.
It finally happened. Word of our little movement has reached past the confines of our stomping grounds, past Jerusalem, past Galilee. Philip and Andrew brought some people from Greece to see me. From Greece! Imagine that. I did not set out to become a household name; my name is so common that you’d have to ask which Jesus someone was talking about. But our mission, our movement – that is less common. To be honest, I thought the movement had died last year after so many left me. They were looking for more miraculous signs, sure; but still, I pushed too hard. You’ll never know how it feels to have so much power at your fingertips, to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could compel people to stay if I so desired.
But above all else, I want people to be free, not to trade one empire for another. I yearn for everyone to choose the light, to walk in the light, for that is where Truth lives. And the truth will make you free.1Continue reading “My Soul is Troubled”→
Sermon for Sunday, December 10, 2017 || Advent 2B || Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
The second semester of my sophomore year of college, the choir of Sewanee performed in concert an extraordinary piece of music that I bet most of you have never heard of. The Dona Nobis Pacem by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams is a work for choir, soloists, and orchestra in a similar vein as something like Handel’s Messiah but with a more eclectic text. The words of the Dona Nobis Pacem come from the Bible, a political speech, the church service, and the poetry of nineteenth century American poet Walt Whitman. Written in 1936 as fascism was on the rise in Europe, Vaughan Williams work acknowledges the horror and heartbreak of war even as it cries out for peace. Dona nobis pacem: give us peace.
Now, the choirmaster at Sewanee, Dr. Robert Delcamp, programmed the music for the entire school year the summer beforehand. So he could never have known what would happen the same week we sang our song of peace. It was the spring of 2003: Shock and Awe, the bombing of Baghdad, the beginning of the Iraq War. And here we were, a little choir at a little college, tucked away on a mountaintop in Tennessee, singing our plaintive cry for peace while the drums of war sounded both within the music and out in the world.Continue reading “Dona Nobis Pacem”→
Sermon for Sunday, February 9, 2014 || Epiphany 5A || Isaiah 58:1-9a
Before I became a rector, I rarely had the opportunity to preach two sermons in a row. At my last church, my rector and I alternated, and we only got two in a row if the other was on vacation. So I’ve never really had much of a chance to preach a sequel to a sermon. But today, that’s exactly what I plan to do. So, just in case you weren’t here last week, let’s recap.
Previously on The Sermon at St. Mark’s, we listened in to Simeon’s lullaby as he held the infant Christ and named him the “light to enlighten the nations.” I invited you to join me in a mission: to bear witness to the light of Christ and to be vessels of that same light. To see the light and to be the light. We finished the sermon with three words to help us remember this mission: Christof’s command to “cue the sun” from the film The Truman Show.
We also went through a few small examples of what being the light might look like: being friendly in the grocery line, standing up for a victim of bullying, welcoming someone to church. Of course, I didn’t mean to diminish what it means to be the light of Christ by offering such small examples; rather, by the accumulation of small actions, we discover the light shining brighter around us and forth from us.
And here’s where, if this sermon were a television show, the screen would go black for a moment and we’d be in new territory. Is everyone with me? Great.
We’ll get back to those three small examples from last week in a bit, but first here’s the opening action sequence of the new episode to get everyone hooked.
So – did you know you are made of glass? It’s true! Now, of course, I don’t mean that you’re made of glass in the idiomatic way; it’s not that you’re easily offended or that your baseball career was cut short because you have a “glass arm.” Nor do I mean made from actual glass that once was sand.
Those caveats aside, you and I are made of glass. God spun the molten glass onto that hollow rod and blew, shaped, and molded each us into being. If somehow you were to scour clean all the layers of accumulated grime – all our misplaced priorities, all our missed chances, all our grubbing and selfishness – then you would uncover God’s glass. Indeed, each of us is transparent beneath the grime of everything that separates us from God (which, by the way, is another way to say “sin”).
With God’s help, we can scour clean some of that grime to come closer to being the transparent people God always envisioned, people who are windows through which the light of God shines. First, we need to celebrate the beautiful truth that we are, in fact, God’s glass; that we are, in fact, the vessels of God’s light we mentioned last week; that we are, in fact, the light of the world, as Jesus claims in today’s Gospel reading.
Second, we acknowledge that our glass is covered in grime. It has lost much of its transparency. The light is shining, but the window is obstructed. We cause some of this grime through our actions and inactions. Some of the grime accumulates simply because we are mindlessly complicit in the big and little sins of the world. The rest happens due to apathy, lethargy, and complacency; we haven’t cleaned in a while, so the window gets dirty.
So first we celebrate that we are God’s glass and then we confess that we do not emit nearly as much light as we are designed to do. Third, we participate with God in the act of scouring. This calls for attention, dedication, and practice – not to mention elbow grease. But I assure you there is no greater goal in this life than to be a window through which God’s glory shines. Truth, reconciliation, love, blessing – all the good things in this life and the next spring from this goal.
The prophet Isaiah knew this. He saw in today’s first reading an accumulation of grime due to a willful misinterpretation of the meaning of fasting. First he accuses his generation of going through the motions of fasting – the outward appearance that seems all well and good but is really covering up the light. His accusation comes in the form of several rhetorical questions, for which the silent answer is a resounding “NO!”
“Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?”
Notice that this certainly sounds like a textbook fast. I’m sure people in Isaiah’s day felt like they were on the right track with such outward signs. But Isaiah sees this as more grime accumulating, rather than more light shining. A fast, he says, should be a way to uncover the window beneath the grime. A fast, he says should look like this:
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free…
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them…
When we participate with God in this kind of life-affirming service, the grime wipes away and the window is revealed again. And, as Isaiah’s next words say:
“Then your light shall break forth like the dawn.”
We are God’s glass. We are covered with grime. But we have every opportunity to partner with God to scour away the grime and shine as God always intended us to do. Recall those three small examples we talked about last week: the grocery line, gym class, and church. Three small examples of partnering with God to shine as light in this dark world.
Let’s look at them again and give them a little more weight. The first was: “In the line at the grocery store when you choose not to be annoyed that the person ahead of you is taking too long.” It’s really just a minor inconvenience after all. Most of the things that send us towards negativity and broken relationships start as minor inconveniences. But by choosing not to be annoyed, by choosing instead to shine with God’s light and let the oh-so-tempting anger pass, we can allow God to turn inconvenience into blessing.
The second has happened every year since the invention of P.E.: “In gym class when you stand up for the kid who’s being laughed at because he can’t climb the rope.” Is this not a child’s first attempt at standing against oppression and injustice? Is this not an elementary school version of Isaiah’s true fast?
And the third, appropriate for this morning: “At church when you see a new face in your pew and you exchange a kind word of welcome.” I can’t think of a better way to be a window of God’s light than to cultivate a welcoming spirit, both here in the safety of our church home and out in the wilds of the world.
Turning inconvenience into blessing. Standing against oppression and injustice. Cultivating a welcoming spirit. These are merely three ways that we partner with God in scouring away the accumulated grime that keeps us from shining. And in so doing we help God’s kingdom shine even brighter here on earth. We can accomplish each of these ways and so many, many more in the small actions of the day and in the big events of our lives if we apply our attention, dedication, and elbow grease to the practice of being God’s glass.
So celebrate that we are, each of us, windows that God has designed to shine God’s light through. Confess that we do not emit nearly as much light as we are designed to do. And participate with God in the act of scouring, in the daily call to return to transparency. “Then,” as the prophet Isaiah says, “your light shall break forth like the dawn.”
So – did you know you are made of glass? It’s true! Now, of course, I don’t mean that you’re made of glass in the idiomatic way; it’s not that you’re easily offended or that your baseball career was cut short because you have a “glass arm.” Nor do I mean made from actual glass that once was sand.
Where the Wind... 