Sermons

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...

A Holy Protest Palm Sunday is often seen as a service of opposites – a liturgy that begins with triumph and ends with death, one that begins with hosannas and ends with grief, one that begins with Jesus surrounded by adoring throngs and ends with him hanging alone on...

Lent 3B The picture from my childhood remains amazingly clear in my mind all these years later. My illustrated Bible, given to me by my grandparents when I was three years old, has picture after picture of Jesus. There is the sweet, cherubic, haloed baby Jesus in the...

Lent 2B There is a book on the shelf in my office entitled The Hard Sayings of Jesus. It contains short essays on some of the more difficult things that Jesus said in his preaching and teaching. I looked at it this week because I thought surely a quote from today’s...

Lent 1B “Thus says the Lord: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted because her children are no more.” We have been here so many times before. The Sunday after a mass shooting. The...

Epiphany 5B I started out this week reading the Gospel for today and immediately found myself both amused and annoyed Here’s the situation. Last week we heard Jesus make his public teaching debut in the synagogue at Capernaum. He also performs his first public healing...

Epiphany 4B When I was in college someone gave me a button that I probably still have in a drawer somewhere. “Question Authority” it boldly proclaims. “Question authority” was a philosophy that suited a journalism student well. In fact, I spent my college years, and...

Epiphany 3B Our Old Testament reading opens today with the prophet Jonah on a beach in the Mediterranean. This is no beach vacation. Jonah looks stunned and confused. You would, too, if you had just spent three days in the belly of a giant fish, then were spewed out...

Epiphany 2 Have you ever wondered how the Bible came into being? Who wrote the many different books that we consider scripture, and who decided what to include in the official Bible and what to leave out? There is no clear-cut answer to those questions. With a few...

Epiphany 2018 Were you surprised to come to church today and still see Christmas decorations? I know from Facebook that there are those among us who were fully decorated for Christmas the day after Thanksgiving, before Advent had even begun, and whose trees were being...