A Sermon for Easter 3 (Year A)

“Lift up your hearts!”

The priest says it every time we celebrate the Eucharist: “Lift up your hearts!” And we answer: “We lift them to the Lord.”

That exchange is one of the oldest dialogues in Christian worship, found in the liturgies of all the apostolic churches. And it’s so short—over so quickly—that we might never stop and think about what it means.

“Lift up your hearts!”

As fleeting as that moment in our liturgy is—and as easily as we might pass the odd phrase over—the fact it has endured so universally throughout the centuries, points to an important truth about what we are gathered for today—what we gather for week after week, day after day.

A Sermon for Maundy Thursday

On Christmas morning I preached about love. I talked about how the Incarnation is God’s Love coming into our midst. I talked about how Love came into our midst so that we can be reborn as children of God, like he was born of a brave young woman in Bethlehem. Love came into our midst to gather us up, like he was gathered up in the arms of his mother. Love came into our midst to swaddle us in himself, like he was swaddled in strips of cloth. Love came into our midst to nestle us into the bosom of God, like he was nestled to sleep in the manger. On Christmas, Love came into our midst—the Word became flesh—to love us: “his own who are in the world.” And tonight on Maundy Thursday, he shows us where that love leads as he “loves us to the end.”

A Sermon for Lent 5 (Year A)

“It’s a lost cause… What’s the point?”

“It’s a lost cause… Society’s burning, and the planet is drowning. It’s too late to reverse the damage we’ve done.”

“It’s a lost cause… The Church is dying; look at the numbers. There’s no hope of bringing back the people we’ve lost.”

“It’s a lost cause… He’s failed again; so why even bother? He’s fallen too many times for it to be worth giving him another chance.”

It kinda seems like a world of lost causes out there. Maybe you’ve noticed? Maybe you’ve seen them? I mean, maybe you’ve felt like you are one? I know I have in the past.

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.