A Sermon for Lent 3 (Year C)

The Bible is a messy story. And I don’t just mean in the ways that are inherent to ancient texts composed by numerous authors over hundreds of years: the ambiguous timelines, the conflicting narratives, the missing details. I mean that the Bible is a story of mess. Pretty uniquely among the sacred texts of the world’s religions, the Bible places the flaws of its characters front and center. Even the ones that play important roles as models of faithfulness, like Abraham last week or Moses this week, aren’t actually consistently admirable people, or even slightly-flawed human beings who are on a steady trajectory of moral improvement. They screw up—sometimes quite spectacularly—again and again.

A Sermon for Epiphany 6 (Year C)

On my drives between Stillwater and St. Paul, I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune. Early in the book, a new ruling family arrives to take control of the desert planet Arrakis, and in one of the courtyards, their son finds 20 date palms. Now, date palms have deep roots that burrow into the soil to sustain the tree and produce sweet fruit even in the desert. But there is no moisture on this fictional planet. So these trees—a symbol of power and pride—are kept alive by constant irrigation, each soaking up massive amounts of water. These trees could not survive without this pointless striving of humans watering them. No matter how far the trees stretched out their roots, they would wither in the harsh realities of their world, like the prophet Jeremiah’s desert shrub withering in the heat.

A Sermon for Epiphany 3 (Year C)

The Spirit of the Lord is upon you. And when I say “you” I mean “all y’all.”

A Sermon for Christmas 2 (Year C)

I regret to inform you that you are children of God.

I say that mostly tongue-in-cheek. But only mostly. Being children of God is indeed a beautiful thing. But we do ourselves and the world a great disservice if we turn it into a platitude—a self-congratulatory truism that papers over the distinctiveness of our vocation as Christians, replacing it with vague humanism and generic good feeling. 

A Sermon for Proper 28 (Year B)

“So what?” I’m not sure how old I was—maybe 6?—but I was like a broken record in the Sunday School classroom that day. God bless the teacher, because I remember meeting every answer with the same response: “So what? So what? So what?” Looking back as an adult, I can only imagine how perplexing it mus have been. What on earth are you supposed to do with a kid who keeps hanging up the lesson by asking why it matters in the first place? 

But it’s a question that continues to be relevant into adulthood, even if it isn’t usually asked with such childlike bluntness. So what? Why bother? Why bother with church and the Bible and Sacraments and pledge drives? Why does any of this matter? It matters because the Gospel offers what is really a pretty provocative idea: that there is hope.

A Sermon for All Saints’ Day (Year B)

When was the last time you cried in front of someone? Did you find yourself embarrassed by your tears? Maybe even apologizing? I don’t cry—like really cry—very often these days, but a few months ago I found myself in my therapist’s office having one of those “ugly cries.” And I was mortified.

A Sermon for Proper 24 (Year B)

Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?

When we come up for communion and the priest says, “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven” or “The Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation,” we answer, “Amen.” At a baptism, when the priest asks, “Do you desire to be baptized?”an adult candidate for baptism answers, “I do.”

Amen. I do. They’re simple statements—words that stay on our lips for less than a second. But how often do we say them with true understanding

A Sermon for Proper 21 (Year B)

There’s this song my family used to listen to, called “So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt.” It’s by an Evangelical singer-songwriter from the early ‘80s, named Keith Green. It’s written in the voice of the Israelites as they trudge through the desert and complain at the beginning of our Old Testament reading today. They want to go back to Egypt—to eating leeks & onions by the Nile—because they’re sick of manna—the mysterious, heavenly bread that God provides to feed them, one day at a time. The song playfully catalogs all the things they made out of this miraculous but dreadfully monotonous gift: manna hotcakes, manna waffles, manna burgers, filet of manna, ba-manna bread!