This sermon was given at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, Washington, D.C. on March 14, 2021, Laetare Sunday. John 3.14-21 (lectionary for the day here).
continue reading.
Category Archives: Sermons and Reflections
The old world cannot hold the new
Follow,
he said,
to Matthew, who was not well-loved,
not to battle, or to debate, or to lay siege
to the powers that be,
but to dinner.
Being the Resurrection: An Easter Reflection
Just imagine.
They thought the world had ended. Everything they believed had fallen apart. The man they trusted, the man they followed, leaving their families and work behind, had died, and it was not a dignified or gentle death. They were unable to comfort him as he left. They mourned. They were afraid, hiding behind closed doors, unsure if they would be next. People gossiped. A poor man, a good man, had died, and the powers that be were ok with that. The world was dark. There were earthquakes.
This was not the plan.
And then, Sunday morning. Just imagine. A garden, blooming with flowers, shining and green, and a woman, alone, grieving, walking in that bright place, perhaps thinking how strange it was to see such beauty and feel such sadness, to be surrounded by life and growth when Jesus was dead. continue reading.
Waiting on Resurrection: A Palm Sunday Meditation
For the last few weeks, as so many of us were isolated in dorm rooms and apartments, unable to see people face to face, or hug each other, opening our windows for sunlight, checking our temperatures twice a day, praying together through closed doors in this unexpectedly austere Lenten season, a friend and fellow seminarian began to create a space – online – for prayer and meditation. Every weekday afternoon, he sets on a sunny table next to a window a couple icons, incense and recorded music – beautiful, ancient chant – and turns on Facebook Live. For half an hour, we can open our laptops or our phones and sit and watch the sunlight, study the faces of Mary and Jesus, listen to music and, for a little while, be at peace, despite our anxiety and uncertainty as this pandemic spreads around us in the world outside.
Making Space: A reflection for the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia 101st convention
As some of you may know, I grew up in a small country church in the northern Shenandoah Valley, with a view of the Blue Ridge mountains, at the edge of a cemetery where I’ll be buried one day. It is a United Church of Christ parish, and it shaped my early faith and sense of community; I’ve written a lot over the years about that church and the land and people surrounding it. My sister and I played in that cemetery, among the graves of our grandparents and great-grandparents. We sat in the pew in the back – on the right-hand side – and my mother played the organ there for 40 years. When the leaves have fallen off the trees in winter, we can see the church from the fields behind my uncle’s house, a few hills away. Generations of families have worshipped there, many of them from the farmland surrounding the church.
To love is to see
Sermon at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Va., on July 14, 2019, the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, two Sundays before the last Sunday before I stepped away from my work there as director of music in order to begin studies at Virginia Theological Seminary, as a postulant for holy orders (priesthood) in the Episcopal Diocese of Southwestern Virginia.
***
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.
“Do this and you will live.”
Jesus reaches back into the Hebrew law to answer this.
But then, the lawyer asks a second question, maybe because, well, he is a lawyer.
Gardens from Ruins
A sermon delivered at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Virginia, on Good Friday, 2019 (April 19).
“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
The first time I visited London, England, nearly 50 years had passed since the end of World War II, but you could still see the scars. One of our teachers showed us small, ragged pockmarks in the sides of great lion sculptures along the Thames, where shell fragments had struck them. The Imperial War Museum and other sites narrate the violence of the battles and the violence of the Holocaust. German bombs fell on the city for six years, killing 30,000 people and destroying 70,000 buildings. The beloved dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral survived because teams of people remained at the church round the clock, chasing after and disposing of anything that fell on its roof. And even that St. Paul’s, if you go a few more centuries back in history, was reborn after its own destruction – the previous St. Paul’s, a massive Gothic structure, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 – the one we know was designed by the architect Christopher Wren, who re-visioned not only the churches but the very layout of London itself in the years following that great disaster.
The Stars Singing: An Advent Meditation
This reflection was written for the 2018 half-day retreat at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Christiansburg, Va. The Ann-Frances Chapter of the Daughters of the King holds this quiet day every Advent and Lent. The first meditation for the retreat, “Voice, Music, Prayer,” can be found here.
Creator of the stars of night,
your people’s everlasting light
O Christ, Redeemer of us all,
we pray you hear us when we call.
When this old world drew on toward night,
you came, but not in splendor bright,
not as a monarch, but the child
of Mary, blameless mother mild. continue reading.
Voice, Music, Prayer: An Advent Meditation
This reflection was written for the 2018 half-day retreat at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Christiansburg, Va. The Ann-Frances Chapter of the Daughters of the King holds this quiet day every Advent and Lent. The second meditation for the retreat, “The Stars Singing,” can be read here.
I have a friend who is an operatic soprano. A few years ago, one Christmas Eve in Memphis, Tennessee, 12 hours’ drive from where I was born and from where my parents and sister and niece and nephew gathered to celebrate Christmas without me, I stood in the side chapel of a darkened, candlelit church, listening to her sing “O Holy Night,” and I wept. That’s what her voice can do.
Dissonance and the Hope of Harmony
A “dissonant day.” That’s what the Reverend Barbara Kay Lunblad, a Lutheran pastor who’s taught at Yale, Princeton and Union Theological Seminary, calls today – a “dissonant” day of clashing images, one “big and powerful, the other small and poor.”
This is a day like the chord you just heard, made up of notes that aren’t in harmony with one another. Christ the King Sunday tells part of the violent end-and-not-end of Christ’s story, just before we begin to tell the beginning of it, this Sunday before Advent.