New Life in Christ

On Saturday September 25th, we baptized an adult man, a five-year-old girl, a baby boy, and a baby girl. Baptism is the start of a new life. In some ways, life is pretty much the same...you look the same the next day, there are the same activities, there are the same challenges as the day before. Sure in a week or two, an adult who is baptized might start doing something new with his or her church because of the commitment he or she has made. A baby is probably going to be doing the same things as the previous week. In the case of every person who is baptized, their lives have changed for ever. They are living a new life in Christ. Christ is living in them, we say. They have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ's own forever. God always loved them and cared for them. Through baptism, we are able to enter into the life of God in a new way. A visible sign of that new life is one's membership in the church, the Body of Christ. Once the water has dried, we need to be reminded of the awesome change that has occurred. As a family of faith, we nurture each other; we are on this journey deeper and deeper into the life of Christ together.

Sermon preview: The Wrong Kind of People

Growing up, many people are cautioned about hanging out with certain kinds of people, the wrong kind of people: people who look different, act different, live in a different part of town, have more, or have less than they did. Jesus was judged for eating with the wrong kind of people: the sinners and the tax collectors. The Pharisees had the facts right...Jesus did eat with the wrong people according to their culture. But what the Pharisees did not understand was the grace of God being reveal through the words and actions of Jesus. God searches for everyone. God will not give up on anyone...even people we might think of as a lost cause or a terrible person. The lesson we have in this week's Gospel, Luke 15:1-10, is really for those who consider themselves to be better than others and therefore remove themselves from the fullness of God's grace.

Sermon preview: The Wrong Kind of People

Growing up, many people are cautioned about hanging out with certain kinds of people, the wrong kind of people: people who look different, act different, live in a different part of town, have more, or have less than they did. Jesus was judged for eating with the wrong kind of people: the sinners and the tax collectors. The Pharisees had the facts right...Jesus did eat with the wrong people according to their culture. But what the Pharisees did not understand was the grace of God being reveal through the words and actions of Jesus. God searches for everyone. God will not give up on anyone...even people we might think of as a lost cause or a terrible person. The lesson we have in this week's Gospel, Luke 15:1-10, is really for those who consider themselves to be better than others and therefore remove themselves from the fullness of God's grace.

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

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.

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)."