A Sermon for Lent 1 (Year A)

Can I tell y’all a secret?

And I know this might come as a shock, but I’m not perfect. I screw up all the time. I fall way short of the life I’m supposed to live—the life I want to live. I leave undone the things God calls me to do, and I keep doing the things God warns me not to. I say things and think things and do things that violate God’s vision of Creation as it should be. I sin—a lot. I’m not perfect. And neither are you.

And yeah, obviously, that’s not really a secret. The fact that I sin—that we sin—isn’t news. As our Old Testament reading shows us, it’s the human condition. Adam and Eve have just been commissioned by God to till and tend the Garden to God’s glory, and already we see them reaching out their hands to exploit it for their OWN glory. And the rest, quite literally, is history: a story riddled with humans misusing the gift of life that God gave us. We screw up and wound ourselves and each other—all day, every day.

But the question before us today is: What do we do with those wounds? What do we do when our eyes are opened and we see what we’ve done?

A Sermon for Epiphany 3 (Year A)

I love being right. Almost as much as I love winning and getting my way. Because if I’m “right” and I lose then at least I can stew in my indignation at the “foolishness” of the people who “won.”

We live in a society that glories in winning and being right. The world tells us that we can only be happy or even safe, if we’re winners, not losers—if we beat other people or parties or nations and do whatever it takes to build the world—the country—even the church that we want.

But obsession with winning—with security or strength or just the self-satisfaction of knowing we’re right and they’re wrong—is an addiction to a drug that takes more than it gives.

A Sermon for the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord (Year A*)

“Tell it again, Ammachi! Tell it again!”

Immigrant families live on story. At least, that was my experience growing up. My grandmother—my Ammachi—left India to join our family in West Virginia when I was 2 years old. And she brought with her a gift: our family’s story. It was a gift more precious than gold or frankincense or myrrh not because the story of our family was particularly remarkable but because it was our story—the story of our family.

In the wintertime, we’d gather by the fireplace to shelter for what passes for cold weather down south. And we’d ask her to tell us the stories again. “Tell it again, Ammachi! Tell it again!”

And so she would tell us the stories again, even though we knew them well.

*This was preached at a parish using A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church by the Rev’d Dr Wil Gafney; so the propers are different from those appointed by the Church

A Sermon For Christmas Day (Mass III)

“If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”

It’s true. But if we stop there—if we treat this catchphrase as the sum of the Gospel—we run the risk of shrinking this love—God’s love—into something vague and abstract. What makes us Christian is not our belief in a God of love. We are far from unique in proclaiming that message. God is love… but that’s not what makes us Christian.

A Sermon for Advent 1 (Year A)

Friends, my heart is heavy today… Kelly Loving (age 40), Derrick Rump (age 38), Ashley Paugh (age 35), Daniel Aston (age 28), Raymond Green Vance (age 22). I was late in hearing the news about the shooting at Club Q in Colorado last weekend. And it felt like barely a second later, six more were dead in Virginia. To be honest, I mostly feel numb when I hear about yet another mass shooting. But sometimes I do feel the weight, when the tragedy touches close to my life.

A Sermon for Proper 25 (Year C)

“God, thank you. Thank you that I’m not like those people—the misers, the slackers, the people who only show up on Christmas and Easter. I’m here every Sunday. I sacrifice my time to serve the community. I pledge to the stewardship campaign every year, and I know I give more than half of these people ever will. So God, thank you.”

This is what the first man in today’s Gospel might sound like if he were standing here now.

The implicit antisemitic bias in Western Christianity might make us hear ‘Pharisee’ and think: “Ah, this is a story about Christianity vs. Judaism—Faith vs. Works.” But that’s not really what’s going on here. For one thing, both of the characters in the story are Jewish. This Pharisee’s problem isn’t that he’s an observant Jew. He prays! He fasts! He gives a full 10% of his wealth to God! These are all really good things—things that God commands and calls us to again and again in the words of Scripture.

A Sermon for Lent 4 (Year C)

How many days in a row can you eat the same thing before you get sick of it? 2… 3 days? A week?

I’m a creature of extreme habit; so my tolerance for culinary monotony might be a little higher than average. But even I eventually get sick of eating the same thing, day in and day out. I think most of us probably know the feeling. If we’re fortunate, we’re able to change things up. We can choose something new when we’ve gotten sick of the old. “Eh, I’m sick of pizza; let’s get sushi instead.” But sometimes we don’t get a choice.

A Sermon for the Feast of the Annunciation

Mary was a priest.

Now, I don’t mean that she was a priest in the way that, say, Father Craig is a priest. I’m not saying that she was necessarily ordained, ministering the Sacraments and other rituals of the Church. But still, today, on this feast of the Annunciation, we do see Mary as a priest in a very real sense.