Worship » Sermons

So we begin again, searching for the risen Jesus, and we find him, at the beginning, in Galilee. We see him calling Peter and the other disciples, sending them out with a mission. We see him teaching and healing and challenging authority. The story is beginning again. As biblical scholar Ched Myers notes, “the story is circular!”Unlike all the other gospels, and even…

I need forgiveness. I have much to confess: I spend too much time on screens and not enough time with my children and spouse. Too much time answering superfluous emails and not enough time with the lonely and isolated to whom I am called to minister. Every whim and desire is answered with a few…

Jesus’s washing is risky. This story, the one of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet is only recorded by John. Even the word he uses for washing is pretty much only used in his gospel. And, really except for scenes with John the Baptist in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John is the only gospel who talks about water: water changed to wine,being…

Martin Luther King, Jr, in a 1968 speech in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, said that “riot is the language of the unheard.” Our Hosannas demand to be heard—not just by any unjust temporal power, but by the one in the highest heaven, the one who lives and reigns into eternity. Our Hosannas demand salvation and redemption…

But what if forgiveness is what we need? Can we forgive those who hold different values? Can we allow God to forgive them – or at least admit that we are not in charge of who God forgives? Forgiveness may be at the root of keeping the law, that if we can forgive, we may…

In Ephesians, Paul writes that God is rich in mercy and — I love this redundancy — out of the great love with which God loved us, even when we were dead through our sins, God made us alive together with Christ. And God did this before we even knew we were not alive and that we were in…

Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the leading Jewish theologians of the 20th Century, once considered “Why is the Torah so concerned with idolatry?” Some times folks say it is because God is unimaginable, implying, by the root of that word, that God has no image. But that’s not it, Heschel said, “No, it is precisely because God has an image that idols are…

In truth, Jesus’s words about saving and losing one’s life make the most sense to those well acquainted with despair. It is the parent who says, “Take me instead,” when their child is beaten in a bathroom. The activist willing to go to jail or be run over by construction equipment for the sake of the trees, the…

And by “wilderness,” Scripture generally means a place that is uninhabited by humans, but it is otherwise overflowing with life: Hagar finds a watered oasis, Elijah gets a nap and a snack courtesy of some ravens, Jonah is swallowed by a whale. When the doors of the ark open, that which had been rendered uninhabited by human greed and sin was filled…

On this Ash Wednesday on Valentine’s Day, I wonder, how do we love what is temporary?  The Psalmist speaks the truth about humanity, how we are only briefly on this earth, calling us grass, mere flowers of the fields blown away on the wind with “nothing to show that we were here.” We often believe that temporary-ness is a design flaw….

Transfiguration is our changed hearts, open to what might come after this life, this death. this joy, this sorrow. Transfiguration is an open heart, ready to be filled. Transfiguration sends us out with this simple command: listen.

Poet and painter Jan Richardson writes, “Crossing from the house of worship into the home of Simon, standing at the bed of a woman whose body has been disordered by illness, Jesus conveys with his outstretched hand that there is no sphere that he does not control, no suffering that is beneath him to heal,…

For the last two weeks, we have heard about how Jesus called the disciples — and us — to follow him, to respond to God’s call and live into the vocations in front of us, to leave behind that which will not allow us — or others — to embrace God’s future and that hinders…

Our call is not just one to find comfort and peace for ourselves, but we are filled by the Holy Spirit and called for the sake of the world. We are called to join God’s work in restoring and redeeming the world so that all people may be free to embrace their calling with choice,…

The good news is that we have been found. Christ has found us. Just as we are, just where we are, without our own work of searching, we have been found. And in being found, we have been called. In our psalm for the day, we hear that God formed us in our mothers’ wombs,…