Sermons

Proper 8B In a few days we will be celebrating our nation’s birthday. The Fourth of July is a festive holiday, full of parades, fireworks, and cookouts. It is a day to rejoice and give thanks for this great country in which we are privileged to live. I think one of...

Proper 7B It is one of the most familiar stories in the Bible, the battle between David and Goliath. This tale of the young boy who, using only a sling shot, defeats a mighty giant of a warrior, has become the iconic tale of the triumphant underdog. At the church I...

Proper 6B I recently finished a haunting novel, Before We Were Yours, in which Lisa Wingate tells a fictionalized account of the true story of one of this country’s great scandals, the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and its director, Georgia Tann. From the 1920s...

Proper 5B There is probably not another story in the entire Bible that has been more misinterpreted, misread, and misused than the Genesis story of Adam, Eve, and the serpent that we heard this morning. One frequent misinterpretation of this myth is that all sin is...

Proper 4B “Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, ‘I am running away.’ ‘If you run away,’ said his mother, ‘I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.’” So begins The Runaway Bunny, which was once a regular part of the...

Trinity Sunday This week I remembered a conversation I had a while back with someone who called the church, presumably to ask for help. “May I speak to the Father?” the caller asked. “Well, there is no Father here,” I replied. “But there is a priest.” There was a...

Pentecost It’s a dangerous moment for Christianity. The followers of Jesus are sequestered in a room. It’s a familiar place to them. They locked themselves away from the world after Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. That locked room was where Jesus found them the evening...

Easter 7B This week one of the principle feasts of the Church passed by, for the most part unnoticed and unobserved. The Feast of the Ascension comes each year 40 days after Easter, always on a Thursday, a day that most of us are not concerned with activities or...

Easter 5B Last Sunday we celebrated Earth Day in our services.  Our scripture readings, our prayers, our hymns were all chosen with that theme in mind. You won’t find Earth Day on the liturgical calendar, but since April 22 was on a Sunday this year it seemed...

Easter 4B Scripture begins at the beginning. There is God, there is darkness, and there is a formless void. Then God goes to work, sending God’s Spirit forth to create. There is light; there is organized darkness. There are sky, and water, and land. There are sun and...

Easter 3B One of the joys for me of being the mother of a young child was reading together every night. When Joseph Henry began second grade we embarked upon the Harry Potter series. By the end of that school year we had finished all seven books, a chapter a night. I...

Easter 2B Maybe you’ve had the experience. You emerge from a room where a life-changing event has take place. Maybe it’s a hospital room, where a new life has entered the world, or a much loved one has left. Maybe it’s a lawyer’s office where a marriage has ended....

Easter Sunday It is one of the most despairing laments in scripture. “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him,” Mary Magdalene sobs. The body of her beloved friend and teacher Jesus is missing from the tomb. It is the final, crushing...

Dear friends in Christ: On this most holy night, in which our Lord Jesus passed over from death to life, the Church invites her members, dispersed throughout the world, to gather in vigil and prayer. For this is the Passover of the Lord, in which, by hearing his Word...

Maundy Thursday This week, Jewish families and friends around the world gather to celebrate Passover with a ritual meal that begins with this question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The answer is because on this night Jewish people remember the...