Monday, August 23, 2010

Knowing and Responding to God's Love

This week's sermon focuses on Jesus healing a woman who had been bent over and unable to stand up straight for 18 years. He does the healing on the Sabbath, which was considered work. The religious official wastes no time in telling Jesus, the woman, and the crowd, that it is wrong to heal on the Sabbath since God commanded that the Sabbath be a special day of rest devoted to God--just check the Ten Commandments. The official, who was a man of God, didn't know the love of God well enough to know that God's love cannot be contained on the Sabbath, and that when Jesus looked at that woman, he really saw her and loved her. There could be no delay in healing her. It seems simple to us, but at the time, it was not as clear. What helps us know God/God's love now in a way that allows us to honor our traditions but also be open to new ways of doing things so as to share the love of God that we have known?

Cookout July 2010

Monday, August 16, 2010

Christ and Conflict: Sermon August 15, 2010

As we look to the Diocesan Listening Sessions on Faithful Sexuality and the Blessing of Same-Gender Unions this fall, I reflect on the divisions in the Episcopal Church, how conflict is part of our lives as Christians, and how God will see us through the issue of human sexuality that is set before us.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Sermon August 8, 2010

This week I'm preaching about faith. We have the wonderful verse from the Letter to the Hebrews: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." What does it mean to have faith? Well, it does not mean that we don't ever have any doubts or questions. In the Episcopal Church, we value the asking of questions. Tillich, in The Dynamics of Faith, is clear that doubt is always a part of faith. Doubt is in fact, not the opposite of faith. In her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris describes her surprise that a monk did not think that her doubts were a major problem. Rather, the monk said that, "doubt is merely the seed of faith, a sign that faith is alive and ready to grow (p. 63)."