Sermons

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

March 19, 2023

Deborah asked me to preach today, and I did my best to respond joyfully (as we commit to doing in Seekers) even though I had no idea what the lectionary readings were going to be.  I feared they would be difficult or confusing or completely mystifying but I was pleasantly surprised to find them so rich that I immediately had a lot of ideas about where to go with them.  Especially the story of Jesus healing the blind man, which contains a wonderful interplay of so many possible ways of seeing and being blind. …

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The Third Sunday in Lent

March 12, 2023

As our Lenten theme this year Celebration Circle has chosen It Depends on Faith. I like that idea. I am thinking of faith as the foundation of my spiritual life. Like the foundation under a building faith has to be rock solid.

Traditionally, Lent is a season of preparation for the celebration of Easter. These two liturgical seasons track the natural seasons of the northern hemisphere, winter becomes spring; the time to preserve energy for the next season of growth.

In the gospel scripture, when Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well he asks for a drink of water. …

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The Second Sunday in Lent

March 5, 2023

The reading from Romans this morning seems very difficult to me.  I wish I could transpose myself into the mind of a Greek-reading early Christian, so I could understand how these words were received!  For us today, all we have is a translation of a language that was very different from ours in many ways, and separated from our era by two millennia.  It’s a hard gap to bridge.

Not being a scholar, I’m just going to give you my sense of what the passage might mean, or at least what it means to me. …

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The First Sunday in Lent

February 26, 2023

Today is the first Sunday in the liturgical season of Lent. Lent may be the most embodied of our seasons – okay, maybe second place after Advent, with all of its improbable conceptions, big pregnant bellies, and wearying journeys. But Lent is a close second: beginning with Jesus’ weakened, weary body stumbling out of the wilderness, ending with his crucified corpse buried in the tomb. And in between, Christians have traditionally marked Lent with some kind of fast.

I feel very attuned to this this year, because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my relationship with my body.…

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Transfiguration Sunday

February 19, 2023

It seems to me that lately we’ve been having a long run of very serious sermons, mostly drawn from every crisis that we hear about in the news. It makes my head swim just to remember the latest crisis. Particularly for the last couple weeks, I’ve barely been able to listen to the news or read the newspaper. I’ve been too distracted with what is right here in front of me. And while I applaud and cheer for all of you who are filled with passion to address these very real and very important issues, I confess that a lot of time I want to just run away to some other place or some other time where I can pretend that every day, and every way the world is getting better and better.…

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