Shouldn’t We Be Celebrating?

18^th Sunday after Pentecost; Yr. A, October 12, 2014

Exodus 32:1-14; Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

            Both our reading from the Hebrew scripture and the Gospel include celebrations.  The Exodus passage is the story of the golden calf.  Moses is up on the mountain receiving the ten commandments, and the people get tired of waiting for him to return.   Which really means, they got tired of waiting on God.  So to satisfy their own impatience, Aaron, the priest in their midst tells them all to hand over their gold.  He takes it and he fashions it into a golden calf.  Then after the people proclaimed the calf their god, Aaron built an altar before it, and led their worship of it.  Theses were newly liberated people.  Freed from harsh servitude in Egypt.  Shouldn’t the priest, of all people, have a clue?  Shouldn’t Aaron have encouraged the people to keep faith, to be patient, to pray?  But he doesn’t.  Instead, he leads them astray.

We Are One in the Spirit

16^th Sunday after Pentecost; Yr. A, September 28, 2014

Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

Before writing this sermon, I went back and re-read the one I wrote for my last Sunday in June.  I wrote about making space.  I prayed that we would all have a sabbatical that would allow us to make space to hear and see God in our lives.  And then I read that story from Exodus.  The Israelites are wandering in the wilderness after being released from slavery and they’re complaining to Moses.  “We’re in the middle of a desert here, Moses. And there’s no water around here to drink.  What are you going to do about it?”  Moses was raised in the palace of the Pharaoh’s daughter.  After fleeing Egypt himself, he was a shepherd.  Moses has no idea what to do about it.  Moses goes to God, frustrated, angry, and feeling a little threatened by the mob’s demands.  “They are almost ready to stone me.” He says.  God tells Moses to go ahead of them and strike a rock.  God will bring water from the rock to satisfy the people.  So Moses does what God commands, and God does what God has promised.  God provides refreshing water for everyone.

It occurred to me that part of hearing God results from seeking God.  I spent my sabbatical seeking God.  I had become so busy with stuff that hearing God was really difficult.  I was hearing a lot of demands, like Moses, not necessarily from all of you, but from the mob that was inside my own head.  From the beginning, starting with those first three days at Cobblestone Retreat Center, I tried to put the demanding side of me to bed, and rekindle a relationship with the side of me that knows and seeks God’s voice.  It was a journey of the heart, not the head. 

I don’t think I realized how much I was missing.  It took a few weeks for me to feel comfortable leaving my cell phone at home.  I almost always have it with me … just in case someone calls and I need to respond.  For the first time in a long time, I felt like I had time to read something and reflect on it or journal about it, and contemplate what it might mean for me, and for my relationship with God.  I found myself leaning into whatever experience I was having, paying attention to what was going on the moment, and nothing in the future was pulling me away from the present.  The mob was stymied.  They had nothing to complain about.  I was doing all I was supposed to do … giving myself over to the moment and whatever that moment entailed … playing with my daughter, embroidering, reading, kayaking on the lake, painting the back wall of the cottage, laughing so hard my face hurt, inspecting my bee hive, listening to someone else’s sermon, walking on a country road in Vermont, experiencing church in different places, spending time with old friends, walking and talking for hours, rekindling a love affair with daily prayer, sleeping soundly every night and not waking to an alarm.  I’m sure some of you are jealous, and if I were sitting in your seat, I would be too!  But I am here.  Standing in the front, and I am feeling incredibly grateful.  I had no idea how very tired I was.  You gave me time to rest, time to go look for God, and I found that I could find God all over the place.  The Israelites ask Moses, “Is the Lord among us or not?”  Well, God is. 

The Lord is among us. 

Making Space

2^nd Sunday after Pentecost; Yr. A, June 22, 2014

Genesis 21:8-21; Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17; Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10:24-39

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

Today’s my last Sunday before leaving on sabbatical and I’ve been talking about it with people, so this has been two weeks of saying good-bye, something that I didn’t expect.  Somehow as I thought about the coming three months it didn’t occur to me that people would be saying good-bye.  Given that more than a year ago, the Lily Grant process encouraged us to plan to mark the leave taking … you might wonder where my head has been.  My head has been occupied with tying up loose ends, getting tasks done, putting the house in order you might say.  My mind has been on St. Stephen’s and I thought I could just silently slip away from other responsibilities.

In the Unity of the Holy Spirit

Pentecost Sunday; Yr. A, June 8, 2014

Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:25-35, 37; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13; John 20:19-23

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

         Today is the feast of Pentecost, a day when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Our Pentecostal brothers and sisters celebrate this gift every Sunday during the year.  They recognize the power of the Spirit in their lives every day.  They expect to see it at work in their worship and in their homes.  The Spirit is alive, and they are alive in the Spirit, sometimes in ways that seem strange to us.  But just as the Son and the Father are made one in the Spirit, so are we made one in the communion of the Spirit.  We sometimes recognize that Spirit in the oddest of places.

Now What?

Easter 7; Yr. A, June 1, 2014

Acts 1:6-14; Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36; 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11; John 17:1-11

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

                        Ascension story in Acts:

They are together with Jesus. 

Asking if this is the time when Israel will be redeemed. 

He says stay in Jerusalem, what has been promised will come in a few days.

Suddenly Jesus is lifted up and taken away. 

The disciples stare up into heaven.

Men in white arrive.  “Why do you stand looking up towards heaven?”

Who wouldn’t be doing that?

            Two thoughts are in there heads.

What just happened?

Now what?

Stones

Easter 5; Yr. A, May 18, 2014

Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

            Stones.  Stones can be used for building up or tearing down.  When I was younger, we lived in North Carolina.  We were the last house on the street adjacent to miles of woodland and a small creek where we would often go to play.  One day down at the creek, I got mad at my younger brother.  I picked up one of the stones on the dirt road and threw it at him.  It hit him in the face, right beside his eye.  Another few millimeters and it would have taken that eye right out.  As soon as I threw that stone, I knew it was a mistake.  I wanted to reach out and pull it back out of the air, but it was too late. 

The Apostles Teaching and Fellowship

Easter 4; Yr. A, May 11, 2014

Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; 1 peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

            We come together for a reason. Our Book of Common Prayer says that in corporate worship, we unite ourselves with others to acknowledge the holiness of God, to hear God’s Word, to offer prayer, and to celebrate the sacraments.[1]  We come together to form a communion, to become one.  My friend’s wife is a painter, and one day she spoke about her painting in the context of worship.  She told the group that she painted in layers.  First one color and then another.  First blue and then yellow on top of it.  From a distance, it looked green, but if you looked at it up close, you cold see that it wasn’t really green.  It was still blue and yellow.  The colors had blended together to form something new, something they could not be on their own, but each color retained its own identity.  Worship is like that.  We come together to become one Body in Christ.  We are transformed as we walk in the door.  If we think of ourselves as unique colors, each painted on the palette of our worship, we each participate in the transformation, and even as we are transformed as a whole we retain our own individuality, our own color.  Every Sunday we become one Body, something we weren’t the week before, a painting we cannot imagine ahead of time.