An Even Greater Superpower (Sermon preached 14 May 2023)

Last week, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by David French, a political commentator who this past January became one of their regular columnists. Undoubtedly some of you saw it – the title was Politics Cannot Fix What Ails Us. And tagline was “Solutions to social problems lie close to home”.

In his article, French notes that there are multiple significant negative cultural changes underway in our country including falling fertility rates; rising teen depression and anxiety, an epidemic of isolation and erosion of people’s sense of belonging; and an overall loss of social cohesion. These negative changes are profound, and don’t seem to have clear political solutions. 

And he observes an emerging pattern. We rightly feel a sense of loss, wrongly turn to politics to fill the hole in our lives, and then grow increasingly frustrated when the political process invariably fails to live up to the expectations that we place upon it. French is convinced that the true answer to our cultural challenge is much more parochial and personal... (read more)

 

Finding Illumination (Sermon preached 23 April 2023)

It was on the last full day of our pilgrimage trip to Holy Land that we finally got to Emmaus. To Emmaus Nicopolis, that is – the Byzantine town that scholars have traditionally identified as the Emmaus of Jesus’ time. There are actually a few other possibilities, including one that surfaced in 2019, Kiryat Yearim, an ancient fortified hill town a bit closer to Jerusalem.

By then our group of 25 had been together for ten days, and had developed a happy, comfortable rhythm. We knew the way on foot from our home base at St. George’s Guest House into the Old City, and had visited some sites there. We’d been off and back on the bus in Bethlehem and the Kidron Valley, and seen the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Shrine of the Book. We’d spent three nights in Nazareth; hit a couple of spots on the sea of Galilee; taken the sky tram up the face of the Mount of Temptation; and checked out the cave where Jesus is said to have fasted and prayed for 40 days and 40 nights. 

And looking back, now, from the vantage point of this morning, it seems to me that everything we’d seen and experienced was being gathered up on that final day, when we arrived where this story we just heard takes place...(read more)

 

A Family Story of Healing (Sermon preached 19 March 2023)

How do we sort through that tangle of a story? It was hard enough to stay with it, right? Forty-one verses! Such a long story, and it’s complicated. 

It’s about an unsought healing. It’s about the blame game. It’s about the process and progress of conversion. It’s about how wrong-headed following the rules can be. It’s about how easy it is to confuse blindness and seeing.

I imagine John had all these things in mind, and more, as he crafted this account of an unnamed man’s move from one way of being in the world to another. And his hearers,  beginning with that first century community in which he lived and wrote, and stretching on down through the centuries to you and me – have been recognizing ourselves in this story, ever since.

Who among us has not, when we don’t know what else to do, thought that if we could just figure out whose fault a tragedy is, somehow that would make it better? (read more)