Being Translated: Receive and Release the Reconciling Love of the Holy Spirit
A sermon by the Rev. Craig Lemming for Pentecost Sunday: “As we renew our Baptismal Covenant together, in this intimate space, we invite the Holy Spirit to be in our voices, to create beautiful memories, to hear the sounds of new life, to feel God’s healing in all of our bodies, to be reconciled in right relationship with the multiplicities of peoples and races and creatures in this land. Come, Holy Spirit, and translate us into the language of Christ’s love.”
Sermon for Easter Vigil 2023
When we walk through clean pain; into and through that sea of terrifying chaos; We need each other. We need God and community. We cannot heal by ourselves. God heals us through relationships in community. Communities just like this one.
Quenching Our Thirst for God: Spiritual Awareness and Holy Synchronicity
Today’s sermon is about how spiritual practices like prayer, study, and worship cultivate our spiritual awareness of Holy Synchronicity. Sacred events when our inner and outer lives suddenly align in encounters with The Holy in particular places and times with particular people – people very different to who we are – that change our lives. Holy Synchronicity is life-changing not because we magically get what we want, but because we suddenly see ourselves anew within an interconnected web of sacred human relationships knit together in spirit and in truth.
Finding Healing, Love, and Belonging in Christmas
What we share in this sanctuary tonight brings us into Dr. Gabor Maté’s definition of healing: “a natural movement toward wholeness.” In a toxic culture of greed that fragments and separates us, these sacred and ancient rituals bind us together in God’s love again. This is sacred and revolutionary ground we stand on where authenticity and agency and truthfulness and acceptance and compassion heal the wounds deep within our minds, bodies, and souls, so that we can become conduits of God’s healing and loving and liberating presence to others.
Do the Quiet Work with God at the Altar Deep Within Your Spiritual Temple
To connect deeply with one another in communion with God’s Word and Sacraments, to go deep within our bodies to do the hard quiet spiritual work of somatic healing so that we can continue to be Christ’s agents of hope and healing, courage and compassion as we serve others through today’s apocalypse. The word apocalypse or revelation names the fact that we are seeing with new eyes painful truths that have always been there, and now all of us are seeing these devastating truths for the first time. As we face hard truths which can set us all free, Jesus says to us in today’s Gospel “do not be terrified; for these things must take place first.”
Immersed with Thanksgiving in the Healing Ecosystems of God’s Creation
Just as the Prophet Elisha instructs Naaman to immerse himself seven times in the River Jordan, we too might feel as angry as Naaman when we realize that healing actually requires us to go to inconvenient places to participate in sacred rituals we might not feel like practicing. And yet, when we immerse ourselves, sometimes seven times, in healing work, we not only find ourselves becoming well, we also become agents of God’s healing for others and for our world.
“Stop Whining and Find Something to Do.” Be Christ. No one else is available.
Great sinner that I am, what I adore about Jesus is that he has the audacity to not only welcome sinners like me at his table but he chooses to be seen publicly feasting with my kind and loving us in public. And let’s face it, the stories at the sinners’ table where Jesus is are juicier and we sinners are far more interesting that those seated at the judgy, self-righteous, holier-than-thou tables.
Pax Romana or Pax Christi? You Decide.
A sermon by the Rev. Craig Lemming on August 14th, 2022. In the name of God who calls us to love, to heal, and to serve. Amen. The Rev. Dr. Barbara Holmes, affectionately known as “Dr. B,” preached a sermon on my first day at United Theological Seminary that made an indelible imprint. Dr. B […]
Go and Do Love: Embodying Mercy and Compassion in Our Wounded World
We are walking that treacherous road from Jerusalem to Jericho today. We see and will continue seeing bodies of children in classrooms, women’s bodies, bodies with ovaries, differently-abled bodies, Black and Brown bodies, same-gender-loving, gender-non-conforming, and gender-expansive bodies, all stripped of their human rights, robbed of their dignity, beaten down by colonial evil, and left for dead, if we do nothing.
An Invitation to Come and Find Ritual Healing in the Holy Week Liturgies
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.
