Show Sermons by Preacher:
Jered Weber-Johnson | Craig Lemming | Marjorie D. Grevious | Barbara Mraz | Guest Preacher | All
“It never ceases to amaze me how easily the church, even our beloved Episcopal Church, slips into a kind of legalism, using scripture to lend credence to creating even more rules and rubrics, higher walls and thicker barriers, in a world already drifting apart, especially when all we crave is community, connection, and healing. We yearn to come together!”
“In the words of the African-American Spiritual, “sometimes we feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.” So, on this Mothering Sunday, in the wake of International Women’s Day, during this Women’s History Month, as we ponder today’s Scriptures from A Women’s Lectionary, we give thanks for people who shared God’s motherly love with us, and made us feel at home, so that we can share that love with those who feel like motherless children a long way from home.”
Rahab’s story raises some important questions, such as: who is worthy of being safe? Who is worthy of being saved? Who is deserving of God’s blessing and favor for generations? Could this be the destiny of a prostitute?
The Rev. Dr. Dorothy White and the Rev. Katie Ernst, preaching at our Racial Healing Eucharist to celebrate the consecration of Bishop Barbara Harris and the life of Anna Julia Haywood Cooper.
“‘Goodbye, Earl’ was one of the last songs The Chicks played in the concert that night, and clearly one that everyone was there to hear. It’s a song about premeditated murder and abuse …. and I like it. But why?” (Content note: this sermon discusses domestic violence.)
“The spiritual greats of our faith tradition tell us that fasting is an opportunity to draw closer to God. In giving something up for a short season, we create necessary space to focus new or renewed attention on our connection with God. I wish I could say this has worked for me. But, more often than not, when I am fasting, I seem to become more keenly aware of my appetites, my hunger, my grumbling stomach or my fuzzy decaffeinated brain. So, how is it that we cultivate space for God? Or, more importantly, how do we cultivate the desire to find our way across the gulfs between us and the one who made us?”
“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.”
“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,.”
“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.”
“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. “
“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.”
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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