February 26, 2020 - Ash Wednesday

Lectionary Readings

In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            Ash Wednesday is a unique day in the Christian year. On every other day of the year, our focus is outward – we focus on caring for those in need, or the environment, or the Church and we focus on glorifying and praising God. Certainly, we praise God in all things, Ash Wednesday included. But today is unique because our focus is not outward, but rather inward. On Ash Wednesday we come face to face with our sinfulness, our mortality, and our neediness. It’s important that we spend one day a year doing this sort of introspection because, for one, it’s honest, but also because such reflection prepares us to receive more fully the grace of God.

February 23, 2020 - Quinquagesima

Lectionary Readings

O Father, with the eternal Son, and Holy Spirit, ever one, vouchsafe to bring us by thy grace to see thy glory face to face. Amen.

            A disclaimer before I begin this sermon. Today is Foundation Sunday, and I’ll say more about what the means later. This year, the Foundation has asked me to speak about the work of the Foundation instead of having an outside speaker do so. That means this sermon will be a bit longer as it is both the sermon and the Foundation address.

February 2, 2020 - Feast of the Presentation

Lectionary Readings

In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            February 2, the Feast of the Presentation, on which we remember that the infant Jesus was presented in the Temple and saw his shadow, meaning we have six more weeks of winter. Wait, that’s the wrong February 2^nd holiday. In all seriousness though, February 2^nd is always the Feast of the Presentation because February 2^nd is always 40 days after December 25. Forty days was the amount of time prescribed by the Law for a new mother to wait before coming back to the Temple for the ritual of purification in which sacrifices would be offered. Normally, when such days fall on a Sunday, they are moved to the next weekday. But the Presentation is such an important event in our faith and the story of Jesus, that the Church calendar notes that this day takes precedence over what would have typically been the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany.

January 26, 2020 - Epiphany 3A

Lectionary Readings

In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            If you stop and think about it, what we are all doing this morning is rather audacious. We gather in the name of an executed Jewish peasant, we say that he reveals to us the truest nature of God and the universe, and then we participate in a meal in which we claim that we receive his Body and Blood, which we then consume. It is rather crazy, isn’t it? Faith really is pretty absurd when our Western and so-called “enlightened” minds try to make sense of it. Even in a very different culture and time, St. Paul knew this and mentions in his first letter to the Corinthians that the Cross of Christ is a stumbling block and foolishness. So if St. Paul is right, and I very much think that he is, then that makes us all fools for gathering with the Cross at the center of our worship.

January 19, 2020 - Epiphany 2A

Lectionary Readings

O Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.

O Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.

O Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, grant us your peace. Amen.

            Generally, when someone calls you an animal name, it isn’t a compliment. Bird-brain, dog, pig, scaredy-cat, mousy – these are not names we want. For every positive one, like “stallion,” there are many more with a negative connotation. It seems, then, that perhaps John the Baptist did not consult with a public relations firm before deciding to give Jesus the moniker “Lamb of God.”

January 12, 2020 - Baptism of our Lord

Lectionary Readings

O God, at the Baptism of our Lord you opened the heavens and declared him to be your Beloved. Grant that by Baptism we might be joined to him in your gracious love. Amen.

            I have a good friend who has been searching for jobs for the past couple of months. He’s asked me to read through his application materials a few times as he tries to succulently describe who he is and his sense of vocation. The titles and dates of previous positions are easy to get. Listing duties and degrees is fairly simple. The hard parts are the identity statements – who are you and why would you be a good fit here? And it’s not just in a job search that we struggle with these questions. We all struggle with those questions of “who am I now,” “who do I want to be,” and “what is my purpose?”

January 6, 2020 - The Epiphany

Lectionary Readings

May Jesus Christ, the light of the world, guide us into the safe harbor of his love. Amen.

            There’s a classic book on Christian mission called “The Open Secret,” and that’s what the Feast of the Epiphany is all about. Through the seasons of Advent and Christmas, the sermons all focused on the belief at the very center of Christianity: the Incarnation. This the belief that God, the creator and sustainer of all things took on flesh and lived a human life in Jesus of Nazareth. It can be easy to overlook just how radical a claim this is. Superman arriving from the planet Krypton or a seed growing in a beanstalk that takes us into the land of giants is actually more rationally predictable than the Incarnation. In Jesus, the infinite becomes finite, the limitless takes on limits, the indefinable is defined. And our own Anglican tradition has emphasized and been shaped by a focus on the Incarnation as the starting point of our identity and theology. The Incarnation is when this unknowable God becomes known; when the secret is opened.