Sermons on Faith (Page 20)

All Saints

Today we celebrate All Saints. The church I grew up in was All Saints so this was always a special day with lots of processions and incense. I think it’s still my favorite festival of the year, because unlike the major feasts which celebrate Christ, this one celebrates us. It’s our day. We often think of saints as people in icons and stained glass; people who did amazing things; in many cases people that today we would treat with therapy…

Transformative Grace

Luke 18:9-14 In our Thursday discussion about the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, someone said something that I hear quite often around these parts. I agree with it and yet it also makes me uncomfortable. They said, “Being a Christian isn’t what you believe, it’s how you live.” “Being a Christian isn’t what you believe, it’s how you live.” Today’s parable helps me understand why it makes me uncomfortable. Most of the faults of the Pharisees came from over-striving…

Baptism

I was baptized one Sunday afternoon, surrounded by my family and godparents, when I was just four weeks old. Not because I was sickly, but because the Vicar wanted a baby to baptize on Mothering Sunday. In contrast, Constantine the Great, the 4th Century emperor embraced Christianity when he was 40 but didn’t get baptized until twenty five years later, when he knew he was dying. As a teenager, I decided that my baptism was null and void since only…

Praise God!

For five years starting when I was eleven, I went to an evangelical Bible class every Sunday afternoon. This gave me a wonderful grounding in the Scriptures, which I still draw upon today, but it also left me with some rather odd ideas. For instance, I was told that you could always tell a Christian because their mouth went up at the corners. This has caused me some problems because as you can plainly see, my mouth at rest turns…

Joyful, joyful

Last Sunday I went to hear Dolly Parton at the Santa Barbara Bowl. I was amazed and enthralled by her ability to hold thousands of people spell-bound as she talked about her family and her friends, sang old songs and new, and cracked jokes for hours… I want to be like her when I’m 70. What struck me most about Dolly was her joy. Her laugh seems to erupt irrepressibly out of her, as though she has a great store…

Creation’s Suffering

Today is Fauna or Animal Sunday, but I’m not going to talk about polar bears or about cats or coyotes. Instead I want to talk about pain. Last week, several of you spoke to me about the pain of seeing the oceans heating up and the water rising; the pain of knowing about the plight of sea mammals hurt by our trash. This is painful stuff. And it is right for us to feel the pain and difficulty that human…

I Came to Bring Fire to the Earth

I. Backpacking A. One of my favorite summer projects over the past 10 years has been back-packing in the High Sierras of Yosemite National Park. I’ve had to put it aside the past few years but it is still bright in recent memory.  It would all begin after Christmas with careful planning, pouring over trail maps, for a 7 day itinerary in the mountains;  then, gathering our usual group of up to 10 young people and parents; getting a wilderness…

Looking for Heaven

It seems as though about every 500 years, the church gets to re-think its understandings of the ways of God in the light of contemporary science and society. The last time was the Protestant Reformation. We are currently living in one of those pivotal times. Times when the old wine skins can no longer hold the new wine and things seem to fall apart. Times when we get to reformulate the way we talk about the ways of God and…