Previous Sermons

12 December 2010
      Advent retells the stories affirming that God’s gifts to us will not be overcome. Take Mary, a young girl, receiving a strange invitation. She did say yes to the angel Gabriel, but she must have had second thoughts. We can imagine her weeping alone, crying, ”Oi wey! No one will believe my story.” Yet instead of despair, out of Mary come the wonderful words of the Magnificat, “My soul has magnified the Lord.”

05 December 2010
       Today we read of John, firm in his message, proclaiming repentance, and openly confronting those who reject or ridicule his sense of urgency. We have a picture of one who knows the challenges the future holds and the change it demands and is fearless in proclaiming its coming.  In next week’s Gospel lesson, John is in prison, separated from his supporters. The fire has left him. He is full of questions and doubts.

28 November 2010
      Advent, in effect, is an optimistic season. It sees the future as an opportunity for human redemption and a break in the dull, discouraging routine. It leads us away from simply burying and mourning the past into preparing a foundation.

14 November 2010
       Luke is telling us that change may very well be frightening, but don't let false prophets hijack your hope by giving up on the present or covering it over with easy answers that make it palatable. Precisely where confusion and suffering is prevalent, God is somewhere present, and we are likely to miss the signs if we let ourselves be drawn away either into despair or fantasy.

07 November 2010
      Today we do not remember those from afar who are celebrities and are high up on platforms and stages distant from us. Rather we remember ordinary, everyday individuals who are all varied and clothed, as it were, in many different fabrics.

31 October 2010
           Habakkuk seems to be the patron saint who turns bitter despair and hopeless lament into conscientious searching, active anticipation and waiting for a new vision. Maybe that is why this passage is paired with the story of Zacchaeus. In his ministry, Jesus sought out and healed those who had been written off and, in effect, considered dead. A leper, someone who was blind, a Samaritan are all symbolic of those who were written off as outcasts or totally in the dark

24 October 2010
      The Pharisee is a good person and the tax collector a real undesirable, who has hurt and exploited many of his neighbors. The sharpness of the parable’s lesson depends on that. The tax collector knows his future is doomed, he has no excuses, no defense, no mitigating circumstances; he is doomed– without God’s mercy. The surprise is—the dependable, conscientious Pharisee also is doomed­—without God’s mercy.

17 October 2010
       Right before Jesus told the parable of the widow and the unjust judge, Jesus was asked, “When will we see signs of God among us? How will we know that the peace of God is actually arriving on earth?”  Jesus replied, in effect, that the fruits of God's new world would not announce themselves by self promotion, blaring the music of the old world.

26 September 2010
      It is this dangerous tendency of separateness and lack of connectedness that’s the main lesson for us in Jesus’ story about the rich man and Lazarus. Jesus is not implying that abundance and availability of resources are bad. The story is not a put down on having wealth, it is about the responsibility to use our gifts wisely and to share, and to understand the innate connections we have to each other.

19 September 2010
      There is no reason to believe that our society reacts any wiser than society of ancient Jerusalem. We are presently in an economic hole and many people are mad about it. Yet it was readily apparent that our so-called prosperity was built on crass speculation, not honest production of goods and services to make life better, that the housing bubble was built on the premise of the children’s game of musical chairs, where the last person to look for a chair when the music stopped would be the only loser, and that much of our so-called wealth was merely a journal entry based on finding a new sucker to bail us out.

12 September 2010
      God opens possibilities, and frees us from the stifling control of despair. People can and do really change. Perhaps we need to honor such successes more than we do, not in order to pat ourselves on the back and become self satisfied and complacent, but because we need to be reminded of the sparks that are lit and burn brightly seemingly against all odds.

05 September 2010
      Now let’s also be clear. Jesus was not abrogating the fifth commandment to honor your father and mother.  Above all else it is our parents who gave us life. In regard to today’s Gospel passage, some commentators have suggested that Jesus was using a Semitic expression and the word hate  is not a good translation of what Jesus meant. Matthew parallels today’s Gospel expressing Jesus’ meaning this way, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

29 August 2010
       In his teaching Jesus liked to use mealtimes as ideal settings to teach a vision of the way God intended creation to work. Examples during table fellowship became signs of God’s new community transforming our world. To put it a little more simplistically, if you want to know what heaven is like, pay attention to how Jesus behaved at mealtime.

22 August 2010
      One of the lessons of today’s Gospel seems to be in cautioning us as a community of faith from relying too heavily on the threat of failure or even expulsion as a way of maintaining a healthy community. Yes, we do have expected parameters of behavior and treating each other, but God’s intention is to uplift and incorporate everyone. God’s purpose is not to distill us, holding on to the best and brightest among us, and letting all others evaporate away.

15 August 2010
       In the Gospel today, Jesus warns about not paying heed to what the signs say about our lives, cautioning us to seek and be open to what we need to hear, not simply what we want to hear. Jesus stands in the great tradition of the prophets, who were not fortunetellers, but rather critics of their contemporary culture, opening people to the possible consequences of their actions to be sure, but directing people to perceive what was going on right before them.

25 July 2010
         When we understand that God enters the world for its redemption, then the mission of Abraham and Israel becomes clear, and the whole book of Genesis falls into place. Genesis begins its history of human life outside the garden with the murder of a brother, the alienation of Adam and Eve's family and the further drawing away from God. Genesis ends with the reuniting of Jacob's brothers, the reunion of his family and the promise that God will stay with them.

18 July 2010
      Jesus knew that life is not just running faster, but is a pattern of listening and talking, of being still and taking action, of learning and teaching, and quite often what appears to be contrasts are really intertwined. That is why doing is not merely anxiously rushing from one thing to another, and distracted by everything.

4 July 2010
       The great leaders of this land, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., among others, all endured times of profound stress and discouragement. It was tempting for Washington to send the volunteers, who made up the army at Valley Forge, home for the winter; for Lincoln to seek a peace in the compromises of the past, or for King to just shut up, lay low, or accept small limited victories. We are beneficiaries of their great legacy because they persisted and refused the temptation to turn back or shrink from the uncertainties and hardships ahead. They trusted in a larger vision they knew was there, even if they themselves would never enjoy its manifest fruition. I suggest that they were sustained by Biblical wisdom.

27 June 2010
      Today’s Gospel from Luke continues by presenting three incidents about would-be disciples. Each of them, in some way, held back and insisted on placing out in front some conditions before becoming disciples. The question we are asked to ponder is were they prepared, were they fit to become disciples.

20 June 2010
      God didn’t enter the emotional turmoil of Elijah’s huffing and puffing. God answered Elijah by reframing and refocusing his vision. God reminded Elijah of his core purpose. Elijah was never going to be a beloved figure in the kingdom of Israel. If they had had such things, Elijah, the Tishbite, never would have reached any significant numbers in the popular polls and he would have certainly been ridiculed on talk radio. But because Elijah returned to what he was called to do, his legacy was remembered and honored.

13 June 2010
      We all know people who cruelly calculate to get what they want. The story of King Ahab and Naboth, is depressingly familiar, especially with people holding great power. In contrast, forgiveness and God’s gift of grace are never calculating, and that is why one wonders if a solely calculating person can ever understand that. 

06 June 2010
      Part of the importance of this ancient story of tribal times was to remind Israel that people, whomever they may be and wherever they find themselves, could further God’s purpose, and that God cared about foreigners, too. Israel benefited from the generosity and gifts of outsiders. The story also indicated that God’s acts of salvation sometimes took place in so-called strange places, and forced people to ask not only what was God doing inside the Temple, the synagogue or one’s own religious community, but what was God doing among the peoples outside one’s religious, social and political boundaries.

30 May 2010
      Both the Bible and the continuing tradition of faith pull together a storehouse of stories to help the people of God maintain a sense of horizon, perspective and focus. Orthodox Christianity holds that there is one God.  We describe God in terms of human language and analogies that all have definite limitations. In the conventions of our English language we traditionally call the one God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  For many, these specific terms are problematic, and unfortunately there does not seem to be as yet any common agreement on a satisfactory substitute.

23 May 2010
      In His teaching, Jesus didn’t use philosophical categories and definitions tied to a certain school of thought. You didn’t need advanced study to understand what Jesus taught. Jesus used common, everyday stories about a farmer and seed or about the misfortunes of a traveler who fell among thieves or how leaven worked in baking bread. They were situations that could easily be identified in practically all cultures around the globe and are as applicable now as they were two thousand years ago. Even today in our high tech world, you really don’t need to know a lot about particular cultural practices of first century Palestine before the power of Jesus’ parables catch you.

16 May 2010
       The Easter season began with Mary and her friends going to anoint he body of their dead rabbi. They carried along with them so many heavy things to the cemetery— painful memories, failures, a future that seemed only filled with past regrets, the stuff of nightmares and the stifling atmosphere of crumbling sepulchers. Mary and her friends made an astounding discovery. She was told, “Jesus is risen! Don’t seek him among the dead. Go, for you are sent to tell the others to look for Jesus’ living presence among you. The women left the graveyard, their heavy packs of the past dropped by the side of the road.

9 May 2010
      Jesus approached a paralytic on his mat, surmising that he had suffered for a long time, and asked, “Do you want to be made well?” The man seemed to have hesitated. Instead of shouting “ Yes, yes!,” he began telling Jesus what had prevented him from getting to the pool where a periodic geyser occurred and presumably the first one who touched the water would be made whole. Because the paralytic was so far away from the edge of the water and so severely crippled, his future was hopeless. He would never get to the pool in time. Jesus abruptly said, “Stand up! Be healed! Take up your mat, and walk out of this place of despair and death.”

2 May 2010
      One of the great gifts of the Holy Spirit is not necessarily speaking in tongues, even though that is the most sensational and controversial; rather it is the often underappreciated bestowal of a recharged religious imagination, stimulating religious poetry, song, drama, dance, and all sorts of imagery and profound symbols in the visual arts.

18 April 2010
The world is still hungry for the Gospel, as it was when Jesus met the early disciples along the Galilean lakeshore. The world is hungry for a place where people are consistently offered a message of hope, faith and love. They are hungry for a fellowship that is compassionate and sensitive to each other's fears, respectful of one's personhood, and happy over each other's joys and accomplishments. They are hungry for a community that is not afraid to share with one another the deeper dimensions of their lives as well as offering the space to regroup and begin again. Humanity does not need a fancy or exclusive reservation for someplace that is separated from life, but an invitation to be welcomed and to be nourished.

11 April 2010
      People of the resurrection don’t have to accept such false choices or closed definitions of alternatives. We don’t have to accept narrow, dead-end futures that are conditioned on the rat race of the world. We don’t have to be afraid of ridicule because we dispute the world’s standards of “get as much as you can, but just don’t get caught,” and we don’t have to apologize as being impractical because we refuse to see suffering as punishment from God, and we believe people don’t have to bear their sins forever. Yes, the world desperately needs to be surprised and questioned a lot more on its own self-serving myopic vision.

4 April 2010—Easter
      Easter begins in the dark. So often great adventures and astounding discoveries begin that way. We set out, not knowing how things will turn out, what we will find along the way, or even our final destination. Easter does not begin like an ending of a “happily ever after fairy tale.” Easter is rooted in real life. We set out not having all the assurances we’d like, not having it completely figured out, and ultimately not knowing exactly when or in what matter the living Lord will be revealed.

28 March 2010—Palm Sunday
       As we look back on it, the shouts of hosanna, the assurances “we are with you, hail the one who comes in the name of the Lord, we will follow you onward and upward, march on, march on in majesty, we are right behind you,” all seem hollow if not hypocritical. Why didn’t the disciples see what was coming? How could they have failed to understand? Why, oh why in the night of Jesus’ final hours did they disperse and run for cover rather than hold fast?

21 March 2010
       The story in John's Gospel of Jesus' being anointed before the events of Holy Week is also in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. It is one of the very few times that a story in John’s gospel appears in any of the other Gospels. Obviously three of the Gospel editors thought this incident needed to be preserved. However, there are some important differences in each of the Gospels.

7 March 2010
       Lent doesn't provide us easy and smug self-satisfaction of having knowledge that no one else has, but Lent does give us hopeful signs of God's presence in the midst of temptation, when we seem to be under siege by the beasts of culture and when we have to live in a strange and hostile territory. Yes, someone here knows the way of God. We are called to be as the angels, the messengers in the wilderness, showing each other the signs of grace. 

28 February 2010
       Some of you may recall that little poem of childhood entitled, “Outwitted”. “He drew a circle that shut me out/ Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win;/ We drew a circle that took him in.” We inevitably draw circles around us, as boundaries, to keep people out. That’s what sin often involves. Yet God is always enclosing us in a circle as with a life net, to include everyone within. That’s often what the offer of forgiveness and a new life of grace involves. That is what baptism specifically reminds us.

21 February 2010
      Lent doesn't provide us easy and smug self-satisfaction of having knowledge that no one else has, but Lent does give us hopeful signs of God's presence in the midst of temptation, when we seem to be under siege by the beasts of culture and when we have to live in a strange and hostile territory. Yes, someone here knows the way of God. We are called to be as the angels, the messengers in the wilderness, showing each other the signs of grace.

14 February 2010
       I suspect the transfiguration served a similar purpose for Jesus’ closest disciples, Peter, James, and John. In the Gospels The Transfiguration is the bridge between the conclusion of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, and the beginning of the final journey to Jerusalem. The disciples were affirmed that they were being prepared for a worthwhile task and they were part of Jesus' mission that was as momentous to people of faith as the journey of Moses or the call of Elijah. The transfiguration was a strange incident, like no other, in the border zone between heaven and earth, between reality and dreams, between the present petty and self-important kingdoms of worldly power and God’s vision of a new commonwealth for humanity.

7 February 2010
       Today we are deluded into thinking that we are so sophisticated and beyond the foibles of a simple people. Often we place great pride in our skill, in our virtue, and in our strength. The fish story of the call of Peter may serve to hook us in a different way. We live in a world brim-full of disillusionment, but people of faith have a history of being supported in surprising ways. When we have the courage to extend ourselves and to cast God’s love upon the waters of our lives, there is always the potential that the wind of the Holy Spirit will send our line far beyond the limit of our insecurities, and way, way out into the deep.

31 January 2010
        When Jesus mentioned the signs of God's grace going outside the expected norm, the indications of God's era of reconciliation among those outside the boundaries of national and religious borders, that his neighbors become enraged, and sought to silence him. The great southern preacher Fred Craddock is fond of saying that "Jesus does not go elsewhere because he is rejected in his hometown of Nazareth, Jesus is rejected in Nazareth because he goes elsewhere."

24 January 2010
      In the Gospel today Jesus was worshiping at the synagogue near the shore of a small town on Lake Galilee. He was asked to read what would have been the appointed lesson, a lesson from one of the last chapters in the book of the prophet Isaiah and written years later by one of the followers of the original prophet. This later follower offered the vision of God reconstituting Israel, after years of exile. And that vision was framed by an ancient tradition of tribal times of what was called a jubilee year, a holy year in which indentured servants were set free, debts were canceled, mortgaged property returned and amnesty and pardon granted. “The spirit of the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty, recovery, freedom.”

17 January 2010
       The Gospel readings of Epiphany are like different photo shots, taken by different people, which invite us to learn and perceive the great event of God entering the lives of humanity in continually fresh ways. The readings are like the advent calendars that open new windows, revealing a different scene every day, but always referring to Jesus’ birth in our world and coming to live among us.

10 January 2010
      In our church’s calendar, the celebration of Epiphany, commemorating the arrival of the magi from far off lands and the disclosure of Jesus’ birth to the larger world, comes without much time for preparation at all. In the Eastern Church, Epiphany is traditionally a larger celebration than Christmas Day, but not with us. Epiphany is almost like a fading epilogue.

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