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).
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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.
Sunday to Sunday: Finishing the First Week
So an entire week has passed at seminary and it feels a bit like a year, in a good way. All of the first-year students (including M.Div., M.A. and Anglican Studies folks) have started a month earlier than the rest of VTS, “nesting,” “orientating” (including figuring out the online learning system and the best way to get to the grocery store without a car), making various Hogwarts references and jumping into our first classes.
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.
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“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.
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.