Tag: love

Humble Triumph

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Sermon for Sunday, March 24, 2024 || Palm/Passion B || John 12:12-16; Mark 14:26 – 15:47

Right now, at this moment of today’s service, we stand halfway between one reading from the Gospel and another. We have already read the story of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem. At the end of the service, we will read the story of Jesus’ passion; that is, his arrest, trial, walk to Calvary, and crucifixion. The first reading is short; the second is quite long. The Church did not always place these two readings on the same Sunday. Way back when, today was just Palm Sunday. But current practice combines the two to ensure that people who do not attend service on Good Friday still hear the Passion Gospel. So what we end up with is a bit of an unwieldy service that jams Palm Sunday into the first ten minutes and then moves on with the Passion. At St. Mark’s we rearrange the service a bit by placing the Passion Gospel at the very end instead of the normal spot for the Gospel reading. That’s why I’m preaching now right after the Epistle. And since we are halfway between the two Gospel readings, I thought I’d spend this short sermon acting as a pivot between the two.

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Worthiness and Grace

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Sermon for Sunday, February 25, 2024 || Lent 2B || Romans 4:13-25

(Content warning: childhood trauma in the fourth paragraph.)

One of the most common conversations I have with people in my role as a pastor has to do with their fear over their perceived unworthiness. They don’t think they’re good enough. They don’t think they’ve done enough to earn God’s grace. They believe God has weighed and measured them and found them wanting. The prayer we’re going to pray right before communion called “The Prayer for Humble Access” seems to reinforce this. I’m going to spend our entire sermon time this morning talking about this perception of unworthiness, but I want to start by skipping to the end and saying this: God blesses us with grace, and this blessing is independent of our worthiness. Stick with me while we talk this through and we’ll get back to this good news at the end.

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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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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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For God so Loved the World…

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Sermon for Sunday, March 5, 2023 || Lent 2A || John 3:1-17

Today we’re going to talk about the most famous verse in the Bible. I read it a minute ago. Did you hear it? How does it start? For God so loved the world…

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

This verse, this famous verse, is tricky for three reasons. First, people tend to isolate it by itself, far from the context of the verses around it. This happens even in the way English translations of the Bible lay out the text; they make John 3:16 its own paragraph for absolutely no discernible reason. Second, people tend to focus on the second half of the verse and decide (because they haven’t read it in context) that John 3:16 is a verse of exclusion. You have to “believe” to have eternal life, and that usually means in practice that you have to assent to a certain set of doctrines that a denomination or a charismatic pastor lists out for you. And third, people tend to make God smaller than God is, in order to fit God inside our limited human understanding. Rather than expand ourselves through prayer and spiritual practice, we instead shrink God to conform to our meager expectations.

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The Funeral Homily

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Sermon for Sunday, January 29, 2023 || Epiphany 4A

On this day of our Annual Meeting, I’d like to spend this sermon time fulfilling a request from a number of people over the last few months. Today, I am going to share with you some of the elements of the funeral homilies I have preached over the last year. Because funerals are mostly attended by family and close friends, very few of the members of our church have heard me preach at a funeral. And yet we are all grieving in one way or another the deaths of so many of our church family – 23 of whom we have buried in the last year. A funeral homily is my chance to set the life (and new life) of the person who died within the greater context of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So today, on this day of our annual gathering, we are going to remember those who have died, and I am going to share with you some thoughts on heaven and the eternal love of God.

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Intercession

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Sermon for Sunday, October 30, 2022 || Proper 26C || 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12

The last three Sundays, I stumbled my way into a sermon series on prayer. Three weeks ago, we talked about prayers of thanksgiving shaping our lives. Two weeks ago, we talked about prayer as a response to God’s constant invitations. And last week, we talked about making sure God is the subject of our prayers and not our own egos. Which brings me to today. Today we’re going to talk about a specific type of prayer – intercessory prayer. So, with four Sundays in a row all on one topic, I’ve decided to call this month my “Accidental Sermon Series About Prayer.”

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Peter and Jesus

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Sermon for Sunday, May 1, 2022 || Easter 3C || John 21:1-19

I can only imagine the maelstrom of thoughts roiling in Simon Peter’s head in the weeks following Jesus’ resurrection. At the last supper, he promised Jesus: “I will lay down my life for you.” He was willing to draw blood when they came to arrest Jesus in the garden. He followed Jesus all the way to the gate of the high priest’s house. And then everything fell apart. People began recognizing him and he felt afraid and in his fear he did something he never dreamed he would do, not even in his worst nightmare.

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Our Great “Why”

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Sermon for Sunday, January 30, 2022 || Epiphany 4C || 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

I spend a good amount of time every January attending to the operational and organizational side of the church as we develop a budget, analyze various metrics, review staff roles, and seek out new vestry members. I wouldn’t consider any of these activities to be in wheelhouse, so I find I have to attend to them in a very focused way.

This can cause a particular problem. I call it the January Problem. The January Problem is this: I can focus so carefully on the “what” and “who” and “how much” that it’s easy to lose focus on the “why.” So today, I’d like to extricate myself from the January Problem and focus on the “why” by talking about two interrelated concepts: love and mission.

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