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. 

Holy Communion

Easter 3; Yr. A, May 4, 2014

Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17; 1 Peter 1:17-23; Luke 24:13-35

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

            What is it about the breaking of the bread that has the power to reveal Christ in our midst?  I mean, it’s a piece of bread, blessed and broken, handed out to each person who comes to the altar.  It’s bread, made of grain and water.  It’s fresh from the earth and formed by our human hands, but we say that in it we experience Christ. 

            My family is Roman Catholic, and my father’s funeral was held in the Roman Catholic Church where I grew up.  My family sat together in the first few pews.  It was a fine service, and the priest did a nice job with the homily, but after the consecration as we were preparing to go up for communion, the priest stood behind the altar and invited all practicing Roman Catholics to receive the bread and wine.  He explained that the sacrament of communion, the bread and the wine, were more than the Body of Christ, receiving it was also a sign of the Roman Catholic Church’s solidarity.  Those who couldn’t come forward were asked to pray with him for the day when all of us would be able to come forward and share communion together. 

Dream Dreams

Easter Sunday; Yr. A, April 20, 2014

Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1-18

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

            In May 1999 I got a call late at night.  It was my father telling us to come home.  My mother was dying of pneumonia.  We made plane reservations and left early the next morning.  When I got there, she was alert and comfortable.  My family gathered in her room.  We told jokes and stories, and she laughed with us all afternoon.  Those who had been up all night with her went home to sleep.  Nancy, my younger sister and her husband and I stayed the next night with her.  She declined over the next 24 hours, and died early the following evening.  She was the first person I ever saw die. 

We Are the Living Word

Lent 5; Yr. A, April 6, 2014

Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

            When I was at Girl Scout camp we used to sing this song called Dem Bones Gonna Rise Again.  It was all about the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, and eating the forbidden fruit.  I sang it with the kids this morning.  The phrase Dem Bones Gonna Rise Again runs all through that song.  As I read the passage from Ezekiel that verse kept running through my head.  For years, our tradition talked about that garden experience as a falling away from God.  A falling that tainted us forever.  We were marked as outcasts and left to drift in a harsh and uncompromising world with the reality that those bones were going to “rise again” in us.  That those same bones would lead us into the same sin, original sin St. Augustine called it.  Sin we could never escape because it was in our very flesh.  Sin that only Jesus could erase.

            It feels like we almost forgot that humanity was created good.  With each new birth, goodness comes into the world anew, filled with potential and promise.  God’s intent for us is good, and the garden experience did not negate that fact.  The Spirit is here to breathe life into us, even now.