Archive for 'Sermons'

I’m spiritual but not religious. I don’t need a church.  I can find God on my own by being in nature or meditating. Being in nature or meditating or any of the other, myriad individual spiritual pursuits can feed our faith. And can be a necessary part of enabling us to be in relationship with God. But being in community is where that faith gets lived out. Where the rubber meets the road.

I’ve struggled for years with the last sentence ...

“Who do you say that I am?” This is the most fundamental question for one who professes him- or herself to be a Christian. There is, ultimately, no getting around the question. We can hem and haw. We can find ways to dodge the question. We can do that wonderful sleight of hand: “what do you think”? Putting the question back to the one who asked us. But at some point, the evasions end.  

Each of us must answer the question for ourselves. Your answer, ...

There’s nothing quite so disconcerting as to be dropped into a story midway through and find yourself wondering what happened before you got there. You are overwhelmed with catching up so you can make some sense of where you are and where the story is going and what it means.

The story of Joseph in our lectionary started last week at chapter 37 of Genesis and this week skips to chapter 45 and then we’re done with it. Wow! There is ...

There is a lot of action in this part of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Ascend into heaven. Descend into the abyss. Word is on your lips and in your heart. Beautiful feet that bring good news. No standing still for Paul. The good news of God in Christ is something that must be acted upon. One confesses with the mouth a belief that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead. Paul continues to be concerned with “the ...

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2). Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet meet and fall in love in Shakespeare’s lyrical tale of “star-cross’d” lovers. They are doomed from the start as members of two warring families. Here Juliet tells Romeo that a name is an artificial and meaningless convention, and that she loves the person who is called “Montague”, not the Montague ...

One more time we face the question: why? Why did a young man make a bomb and blow up a building? Why did he then take a gun and kill and wound people? Why is destroying property or killing or wounding someone else the perceived answer to our frustration, despair, loneliness or hatred?

One more time we face the question: how? How do we respond to an action that makes no sense to us? We know how to pray for ...

One of the optional tours at the National Plymouth Owners Club meeting held in Detroit a couple of years ago was a bus tour of automotive sites including some that had been shuttered but had historic significance. The tour was both fascinating and very sad. Sad to see how many factories that used to employ hundreds if not thousands now stand in acute disrepair.

Broken windows. Broken asphalt. Sadness that what was once a bustling hive of activity is now forlorn, left ...

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these — the homeless, tempest-tossed — to me;
I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door.

Emma Lazarus wrote these words. They are inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. They are a symbol of what this country represented to the world when it was founded. During the years that immigrants were processed at Ellis Island, the Statue loomed large- a sign ...

The Day of Pentecost: Whitsunday – June 12, 2011

Well, we’ve already done some special things this morning (not that we haven’t done them or things like them before on this day)—like trying to suggest what “a mighty wind” might have sounded like (assuming you could get the CD player to start up on cue!) and releasing a bevy of balloons over the congregation; one year I remember we had the kids recreate the moment in John’s Gospel when Jesus “breathed ...