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Jered Weber-Johnson | Craig Lemming | Marjorie D. Grevious | Barbara Mraz | Guest Preacher | All

Sermon for the Feast of Absalom Jones

“This work of Justice: Becoming God’s Beloved Community is challenging. That is why I need to know that saints like Absalom Jones chose Christ’s love and friendship, in spite of slavery, in spite of heartbreak, in spite of violent, racist, demonic coloniality, My devotion to saints who embodied, lived, and worked as antiracist and decolonial agents of Christ’s reconciling love has become a slight obsession of mine. I want you to fall in love with these saints and to be as obsessed with them as I am.”

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The Rev. Craig Lemming February 11, 2024

Liturgy and Dignity

“This is why we practice our faith together over and over with rituals and rites that affirm we are worthy of love and dignity, that we are created in the image and likeness of God. Because none of us can believe on our own, each and every day, that we are loveable and deserving of love. We have to hold this truth together in community, reminding and being reminded by one another, by the nearness of sacraments like Eucharist and baptism, by the stories of the saints and Jesus himself,.”

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Rev. Jered Weber-Johnson February 11, 2024

Anna, first and only prophetess of the New Testatment

“In my black christian church culture there’s a call and response we say and most anyone of us will have the same response to friend and stranger alike, and it goes like this: One person exclaims the question, ‘Won’t He do it?’ and the immediate answer is a resounding, ‘YES, He Will!’ I envision a moment like that between Simeon and Anna.”

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Marjorie Grevious February 5, 2024

Leave Your Nets, Listen to God’s Calling, Follow the Way of Love

“Like Jonah, we become so fixated on escaping our own lives, we get swallowed up and stuck in the bleak, terrifying, and extremely stinky belly of a sea monster. Nevertheless, after Jonah’s sublime prayer, God causes the whale to vomit him out onto the dry land, and as we heard in today’s First Lesson, ‘The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.’ Today’s sermon is about God’s endless supply of second chances. “

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The Rev. Craig Lemming January 21, 2024

Sermon by the Rev. Cynthia Bronson Sweigert

“Many women and men say that Mary, at least as often portrayed, is much too passive. I understand this thinking because I often feel the same way. The Magnificat, the Song of Mary, is not one of those portrayals.”

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Guest Preacher January 3, 2024

It’s A Whole Mood

Craig’s eyes were filled with tears, while a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, and then I was swept up in that moment too, feeling all my own feels, in the candlelight and the fragrance of cedar and pine, and the music and the tears. It was, as the kids say, a whole mood! Well, ok, I’m told the kids don’t say that anymore. But, whatever. When I saw my dear colleague weeping and smiling, that was my first reaction, to resonate with it in all its emotional complexity. How could I not.

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Rev. Jered Weber-Johnson December 24, 2023

Show Up Unacceptably Anyway: Jesus Christ Comes to Visit Us in Great Humility

Today, Howard Thurman will be our spiritual guide. Two short excerpts from his “Meditations for Apostles of Sensitiveness” will open and conclude my homily. And for those who are not into being all spiritually woo-woo and contemplative, fear not! There’s an outrageous story about humility; the science behind blushing; and some theology for my fellow church nerds.

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The Rev. Craig Lemming December 3, 2023

Heidi J. Kim: Feast of King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma of Hawai’i

We might want to glamorize or glorify the legacy of King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma, even as their descendants live with the consequences of a racist form of capitalist exploitation of the natural resources that were a sacred source of life for the original inhabitants of that land. How can we hold all these stories on this feast day, appreciating how Kamehameha and Emma lived, ruled, and worshipped, while also acknowledging the cultural genocide that has impacted their people? How might we find absolution and forgiveness? How and when will we turn to a new way?

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Guest Preacher November 26, 2023

Matthew 25:14-30

Noted theologian and TV writer and producer Shonda Rhimes once wrote: “Freedom lies across the field of the difficult conversation.” So I want to give you fair warning: this sermon will be one of those difficult conversations. If I wasn’t trying to give you a warning, I would’ve started my sermon with these words from Frederick Douglass: “Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery…I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.”

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Chelsea Stanton November 19, 2023

Hard-Won Wisdom: Replenishing Our Spirits to be Christ’s Loving Light

I know what it feels like to experience what Blanche DuBois hallows with her heartbreaking line from A Streetcar Named Desire, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” In fact, the story of how I became an Episcopalian begins with the kindness of a stranger who pitied me when I, like one of the foolish bridesmaids, was found lacking at the last minute.

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The Rev. Craig Lemming November 17, 2023

Conflict Births Reconciliation: Love is not a feeling. Love is a practice.

I have witnessed how conflict has been faced in healthy ways and in not so healthy ways in a variety of faith communities. I have been in healthy conflict and I have also been in unhealthy conflict. Unhealthy ways of dealing with conflict, like triangulation – complaining to people about a person we refuse to speak to directly – avoids the hard work required of love. Erich Fromm famously writes, “Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, love is a practice.”

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The Rev. Craig Lemming September 10, 2023
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