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Tag Archives: love
Love one another?
A sermon for the fifth Sunday of Easter in 2025. Love is not a light undertaking. Love will break your heart. Love will ask you to move mountains. Love will require that you sacrifice your most closely held prejudices, melt … Continue reading
Posted in homily, sermon
Tagged Acts 11, Easter 5 Year C, Jesus, love, love one another, new commandment, Peter, Revelation
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What heals history?
We enter this new year, and this new season after Christmas, with some trepidation, don’t we? We are haunted by the shadows of the past, concerned for the present, warned by the violence that greeted the new year in New Orleans and Nevada and far beyond; our hopes and fears for the future year clash and mingle in the air like smoke.
And yet this is the Feast-day, the celebration of the Epiphany, the manifestation of God’s incarnation to the nations, to us. The bright promise that God is with us, even us. Continue reading
Posted in current events, holy days, lectionary reflection, sermon
Tagged Epiphany, Herod, Incarnation, insurrection, Jesus, love, Matthew 2:1-12, The Revelation of the Magi
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A departing
The legends and myths of the kings and the Magi, drawn from faithful, imaginative engagement with the biblical text, resonate with us as a church as we draw together to seek the same saving grace: God with us, Emmanuel; a holy Communion in Christ. The legends reflect our life together as a church, as people, whose paths converge and cross and diverge on the journey toward Christ. We will mark one such departure this morning. After twelve years together, we will remain always united in our experience of God in Christ and in this gathering at the manger and the table and the cross; and yet we will leave by different roads. Continue reading
Posted in holy days, lectionary reflection, sermon
Tagged Communion, Epiphany, grief, Jesus, leaving, light, love, magi, Matthew 2:1-12, parish, Revelation of the Magi
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Emmanuel
I misremembered the title of the children’s story that I cited in the middle of this reflection: I think it still works. In the Advent to Christmas stories we find a lot of fear, and a balancing dose of faith. … Continue reading
Posted in advent meditations, homily, lectionary reflection, sermon
Tagged Advent, Christmas, Emmanuel, God, grief, Incarnation, Jesus, love, picture books
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Witness
A sermon for All Saints Sunday We all know about Lazarus, don’t we? Lazarus has become a byword for those who return from the dead. In paleontology, Lazarus names those species that disappear from the fossil record as though extinct, … Continue reading
Posted in holy days, homily, sermon
Tagged All Saints, grief, Isaiah 25:6-9, Jesus, John 11:32-44, Lazarus, love, Year B All Saints
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Maundy Thursday: love
And in the next heartbeat he was on his feet, filling the bowl with water, stripping off his robe and rolling up his sleeves, because he knew that if he was to leave them knowing how to love, he needed to show them the depth, the humility, the profundity of his love for them. Continue reading
Love builds up
Knowledge is like a little bird making itself look large by fluffing up its feathers; it warms the bird, it helps the bird, it protects the bird at times; it is all for the bird’s own good.
Love is like the bird that builds a nest, patiently searching for just the right materials to stop the draught and secure the foundation for its family, who stocks it with food when the eggs are incubating, who creates the conditions for new life to flourish. Love is the bird who comes back and starts again when it all goes wrong because of the storms or the predators or the sadness of the world. Love builds up. Continue reading
Posted in lectionary reflection, sermon
Tagged 1 Corinthians 8:1-13, authority, Jesus, love, Mark 1:21-28, Year B Epiphany 4
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Words that do not pass away
I do not remember well my mother’s voice any more; the soprano on the cd is younger than I knew her. What I carry buried deep within my skull are nursery rhymes and nonsense that emerge like sea mammals, occasionally, … Continue reading
Maundy Thursday message
This, for me, was the tragedy of Judas: that he couldn’t see how much God loved him, even when God was right in front of him, washing his feet. Continue reading
God’s gift
We do not get to choose whether or not God loves us. Whether we feel worthy or wormy, God loves us, and we cannot make it otherwise. Continue reading
Posted in advent meditations, homily, sermon
Tagged Christmas, gift, Isaiah 7:10-16, Joseph, love, Matthew 1:18-25, Year A Advent 4
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