Breathing God (Sermon preached 11 April 2021)

Happy Easter everyone! Today is an Easter Sunday, you know. In the liturgical year, there are seven Sundays of Easter – not “after” but “of”. The church in its wisdom, and guided by Luke’s chronology of events in the Book of Acts, designates an Easter season of fifty days. Fifty days during which “Alleluias” abound and, as one commentator put it so eloquently, we “live into the reality of what it means to be a community shaped by the dying and rising of Christ, by the expectation-shattering reality of life victorious over death”.

It’s a good thing we have fifty days! Because that sounds like the work of a lifetime to me - and not just of an individual. The lifetime of a parish. The lifetime of the Church, continuing through centuries, through millennia of Sundays. In this morning’s Gospel, though, John directs us back to the very first Easter Sunday...(read more)

What Do You See? (Sermon preached 21 March 2021)

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus”, the Greeks say to Philip in this morning’s reading from the twelfth chapter of John’s Gospel. I’ve heard, and you may have too, that those words can be found etched in wood, or engraved on a brass plate, or just printed on a piece of paper – in this or that church pulpit.

So this past week I googled it: “Sir, we wish to see Jesus - pulpit” and bingo - 7 million hits. And I can now confirm that you will find a “Sir we wish to see Jesus” sign of some kind at the Cathedral Church of St. James in Toronto, St. John the Divine Episcopal in Houston, Westport Presbyterian Church in Kansas City, the parish church in Donegal, Ireland, and the Church of the Open Door in downtown Los Angeles. Just to name a few...(read more)

Just What We've Signed Up For (Sermon preached 28 February 2021)

Ever since Stefanie’s sermon a couple of weeks ago about the healing of Peter’s mother, when she introduced the idea of six-word memoirs (remember? Because Jesus resurrected her, she served?), a lot of us have been composing pithy summaries of our experiences of God, the pandemic, or just what we are feeling in the moment. For example: Feeling lonesome; have mask; will drive. So many desserts; so little time.

Earlier this week, when I sat down with today’s Gospel reading, I got to imagining what Peter might have come up with, when Jesus started talking about the Son of Man needing to suffer and die, and his followers needing to deny themselves and take up crosses. And the six words that almost immediately came to me were Not what I signed up for... (read more)

An Epiphany of Love (Sermon preached 14 February 2021)

Today is the last Sunday after Epiphany. And every year on the last Sunday after Epiphany, we hear the story of the Transfiguration. All three synoptic Gospels include this mother of all epiphanies, or manifestations (that’s what epiphany means), of God’s presence and purpose in Jesus of Nazareth.

Which means that this epic story gets preached on, over and over again. And therein lies the challenge: how does one, year in and year out, keep coming up with things to say? In the beginning I did what most newly minted seminary grads do...(read more)