A Sermon for Pentecost (Year B)

If you’ve been around Ascension recently and heard me talk about my childhood, you’ve probably gleaned that I was an eccentric kid… sometimes intentionally so. So it kind of checks out that in about the 4th grade I declared that my favorite book was not one of the Harry Potter books my peers like, or even Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but The Silmarillion—the frankly too-dense-for-a-4th-grader anthology of myths that JRR Tolkien wrote as part of the backstory for his Middle Earth and The Lord of the Rings.

A Sermon for Easter 6 (Year B)

I am not naturally good at keeping promises. Like many alcoholics, I learned a pattern early on of looking out for myself, and only myself (despite my good intentions a lot of the time). It’s that tragically familiar pattern that lies behind so much of the strife and division in our world. I learned to over-promise and under-deliver—to set my well-being in a fake competition with the well-being of others. By God’s grace I’ve grown on this front, little by little. But it can still be hard for me to “get” the promises of God that our opening collect asks for today:

A Sermon for Lent 3 (Year B)

Okay, so: I’m a huge Star Trek fan. Growing up in a very Fundamentalist environment, I wasn’t allowed to watch a ton of TV growing up. But my parents were (inexplicably) major Trekkies. So Star Trek—particularly The Next Generation—played an enormous role in my childhood development.

A Sermon for Ash Wednesday

“Man, Christianity is metal as f—!” I won’t finish that sentence here, but you get the gist. I laughed out loud when I got that text from my friend Jay. He meant it as a compliment. Jay didn’t grow up religious at all; so I was explaining Lent and Ash Wednesday to him and telling him about the reminder of our own sins and mortality that we gather today to mark our foreheads with. And he was a fan.

A Sermon for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany (Year B)

It’s somewhere between a grimace and a look of pity—the face people make when they learn that I grew up in churches that took pride in labels like ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘Evangelical.’ And it’s completely understandable given that the face of Christianity for many in America is the fire-and-brimstone Evangelical preacher proselytizing on street corners. There are some things I do actually value about my Evangelical childhood. I got to know the Bible really well and learned to pray off-the-cuff. But the Evangelical approach to “sharing the good news” was not one of those gifts.

A Sermon for Epiphany 5 (Year B)

“Are you free? Are you really free? How do you know?” It was a helluva way to start a college class. And when my professor opened the PoliSci seminar by basically asking us to define the concept of freedom, at first I braced myself for a heady lecture divorced from reality. But while the question may have been framed in big, sweeping terms, the discussion that followed actually revealed pretty quickly that freedom is far from some vague abstraction without any tangible meaning for our lives.

A Sermon for Epiphany 3 (Year B)

I had a magic couch in my basement growing up. In the universe of make-believe that my sister and I created, that beat-up, old couch transformed into so many things: a castle, a spaceship, a stage for our plays. One day, that couch was a boat on the water, as my little sister and I threw a big crocheted blanket over the side “fishing” for the Beanie Babies strewn on the floor. I was so captivated and immersed in our imaginary work, that my grandmother’s voice didn’t even register at first. But when I realized she was calling us upstairs for dinner, I leapt to my feet and jumped towards the stairs…only to fall flat on my face with my toes tangled up in the “net” I was leaving behind in the “boat.”

A Sermon for Epiphany 2 (Year B)

“So, uh… what’s next for you?”

When I got sober and realized that if I wanted to stay sober, I’d need to leave my graduate program, it felt like I was fielding this question constantly.

“What’s next?”

Filtering out the frustration-fueled profanity, I’d deflect by saying, “I don’t know. We’ll see.” Because I really didn’t know what was next. I was at a fork in the road, but I didn’t know what path to take—what path God wanted me to take. And I didn’t know how to even begin figuring that out.

Life is chock-full of those transitions—moments when we are faced with the question of what’s next. We graduate; we get laid off; we lose loved ones; we retire. And we say, “I don’t know what’s next. We’ll see.”

But how will we see?