Sermon Archive (Page 41)

Wholeness (Slow Church 3)

This morning I’m continuing with the sermon series based on the book Slow Church. The title Slow Church is a riff on the Slow Food movement which, unlike fast food, provides locally and sustainably sourced food. Today when we talk about whole food we think of the grocery chain, but before that, whole foods referred to food which was un-processed and often organically and locally produced. Today we’ll be thinking about wholeness in the life of the faith community. Wholeness…

Narrative Theology #1

I have two concrete early memories of church from my childhood, one fairly happy, and one much less so.  The happy memory is of attending services at my grandmother’s small Presbyterian church in LaSalle, Michigan. To a child, church isn’t necessarily the most interesting way to spend an hour on a Sunday morning, but I was a reasonably compliant and well-behaved kid, and I liked to please my grandmother.  So, we went.  I can still remember the smell of that…

Wobbling but not Falling

Almost every week I talk with my dear friend Rebecca in Scotland. Sometimes when I ask how she’s doing she says “I had a major wobble this week.” A major wobble. A major wobble is when things seem to get out of control and temporarily beyond our emotional capacity to handle. In some ways, I think we at St Ben’s have been having a major wobble. Two of our beloved members have died in the last few months – Elizabeth…

Why was it necessary?

1 Peter 1:17-23 Luke 24:13-35 This morning’s gospel is a deeply heart-warming story of the two disciples who walked in deep sorrow and in their sadness did not recognize the resurrected Christ walking by their side. Those of us who have experienced grief or illness know how that happens; in our times of deepest pain it is most difficult to recognize God, which is one of the reasons that developing a discipline of looking for God in the midst of…

Living as if Easter is Real

When I was a growing up we didn’t have Easter egg hunts. People in Britain give each other large hollow foil-covered chocolate eggs, often filled with candy. I think I was eight the Easter I had chicken-pox and I got a bumper crop of Easter eggs. I never had so many before or since. Yesterday I happened to be briefly at an Easter Egg Hunt. There was a separate section for the little ones, where eggs lay totally unconcealed and…

Deep Sadness

And so we come to the deep sadness that is at the heart of humanity. Today we are faced with our human propensity to victimize the innocent, to resort to violence when we are threatened. Today, dozens of Christians were killed worshipping in church in Egypt. Today, children are dying of starvation in the Sudan and Somalia while as much as half of all the food produced in this country is thrown away. Today, Syria is a desolation. We can…

Jesus Wept

John 11:1-45 Personally, I have two favorite bible verses that I would like to share with you.  Through the years, I have found that these two verses have the ability to either give me goosebumps or make me to tear up, or actually sometimes, cause me to do both. The first of the two we heard last year, year “C” in our Episcopal Lectionary.  The verse comes from Luke in his account of the Passion of Christ.  Two thieves are…