Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer. Amen.
When I was 12 I lit a beach on fire. I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but it bears repeating. I was bored and without playmates and I found myself for one reason or another at the small lagoon near our home, meandering along the beach when the dry grass at the shores edge caught my eye. I had some matches in my pocket and without wondering whether or not I should, or why, I was soon engaged in the ever so risky practice of lighting small fires among the grass, watching with curiosity as it spread slowly outward from a single match.
A sermon for Earth Day Sunday by The Rev. Cynthia Bronson Sweigert
Finding our climate stories is how we sustain ourselves in the movement towards climate justice. Climate stories identify where our heart connects to the environment. Often a cherished memory from childhood, it could be from summer cabins running through the woods or gardening with a grandparent.
There came a point, some time back in the pandemic, staring out at an empty room, at yet another live streamed service, when I was certain I could not remember what it was like to have the nave full of beaming faces, and I could not imagine when it would be like that again. Yet, here you are – neither a memory nor imagined, but alive, here, in the flesh! Alleluia Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
A sermon by Dr. John E. (Jay) Phelan:
When I was a kid, we didn’t do Good Friday. It wasn’t that the church I attended didn’t talk about the death of Jesus. It did; often and in some detail. It was just that like many churches when Easter season rolled around it was as if daffodils, pastel dresses, and white shoes overshadowed the gloom of Good Friday. It was Jesus resurrected we were eager to see, not Jesus executed and entombed.
A sermon by Dr. John E. (Jay) Phelan:
Any first century Jew who heard a story that began, “A man had two sons . . . would think, Uh oh. Any story starting this way will only lead to trouble. The Torah is simply full of sibling rivalry. Consider the case of the first siblings—Cain and his younger brother Abel. Here we find not only the first murder, but the first worship war. Cain is infuriated that for some reason his way of worship is deemed inferior to that of Abel and kills him, When God confronts him, he responds with a line that is with us to this day: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The human family does not get off to a very good start. But it continues.
“Why is this night different from all other nights?”
The youngest child asks this question at the seder dinner, during the Jewish Passover, which begins tomorrow. The answer is about history that on this night God sent the angel of death to kill the firstborn sons of the Egyptians (who had enslaved the Jews), but the Israelites were told to sacrifice a lamb and smear the blood on the door of their houses so that the angel would know to “pass over” their homes.
Today’s Homily is a brief invitation to enter into and to cross sacred thresholds. I invite you to come to church to participate in and to be fully immersed within the healing power of each of the Holy Week liturgies. Come and inhabit the sacred narratives of the Passion, Crucifixion, death, burial, and Resurrection of Jesus in the Holy Scriptures; through the practice of ancient rituals entrusted to us by our faithful ancestors – the hymns, processions, chanting, foot-washing, consecrations of bread, wine, water, oil, and fire; but most of all, come wholeheartedly to intentionally be with one other.
Yesterday, some of us were a part of a Lenten Retreat given by Saint Johns for our Older Wiser Laity, our OWLs, wherein several members made presentations in art, and song, and poetry on the Seven Last Words of Christ. One of those presentations we were privileged to hear, by our own Dr. Paula Cooey, drew from her decades of experience teaching an ethics course at Macalester College, called “Love and Death.”
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