Sermons
In the Eastern Orthodox Church there is one sermon preached at the Easter Vigil and that is the paschal homily of St. John Chrysostom, written in 4th century. And as far as I’m concerned, it is the best sermon ever written. So when I sat down this week to write my own paschal homily, I swiftly realized that there is no point in trying to imitate perfection, when perfection is already before us. So I’d like for us to be Orthodox for the next ten minutes and I’ll preach it for you. Chrysostom captures so perfectly the theology of Easter, which is the theology of Christ Jesus himself. And the theology of Easter is that Christ, through his death and glorious resurrection conquered once and for all any power which sin and evil holds over us. Christ conquered death and we are free. Full stop.
Today, Palm Sunday, we are thrust directly into the drama of Holy Week. There is no soft peddling or easing into things. We begin this liturgy in the exact manner we know this story will end – with triumph. Jesus’s triumphal entry to Jerusalem is a foreshadowing of what is to come on Easter Day with Jesus’s triumphal resurrection, and on the last day, with Jesus’s triumphal return.
This Sunday we are deep in the season of Lent, equally far from the celebration of Shrove Tuesday and the rejoicing of Easter. The midway points of our journey through the Lenten wilderness often bring the toughest trials as we struggle to maintain our enthusiasm for the discipline and repentance that the season calls for. We might find ourselves grumbling at the thought of several more weeks of sober liturgy, we might find ourselves getting lax in our prayers and our Lenten commitments. We might just be getting tired of the color purple.
As we approach the halfway point of Lent, there’s a particular spiritual discipline that I’d like to commend for your consideration: foolishness. And not just the variety you may or may not have partaken of on Mardi Gras.
But before you tell your friends that your priest told you to go out and ‘act a fool,’ as they say where I’m from, hear me out. Foolishness is baked into our theological tradition from the very start. We hear St. Paul gesture towards the notion of holy foolishness. In his letter to the Corinthians as he writes: “God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe… for God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, God’s weakness is greater than human strength” (1 Cor. 1:21ff).
oday is the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany. Sandwiched between Advent and Lent, Epiphany is sometimes one of those seasons whose purpose can be unclear, so before we enter into Lent next week, I wanted us to take a look back on Epiphany to understand how it fits into our understanding of who Jesus is. First of all, the seasons of Advent, Epiphany, and Lent all go together in that order. They each walk us through three distinct periods in Jesus’s life. Advent of course is about preparing for Jesus’s birth and arrival in the world. Lent is about preparing for Jesus’s death and resurrection. And Epiphany is about everything in Jesus’s life in between. His public ministry, his teaching, his casting out of demons – lest we forget that – and most importantly, the small and large epiphanies his followers discover along the way about who exactly Jesus is, and how he shows up for them.
St. George’s let’s talk about demons. There comes a time in every liturgical year, when the lectionary turns to Jesus’s extraordinary public ministry, that the awkward topic of Jesus casting out demons arises. We all know and love the stories about Jesus the healer, Jesus the teacher, and Jesus the miracle worker, but when it comes to Jesus the exorcist… we’re often left feeling a little itchy and scratchy. The reality is we just don’t have a cultural and theological hook on which to hang this talk about demons anymore. Demons are just not something most of us really think about or know how to deal with when they come up in scripture.
“I will make you fish for people,” Jesus said to Simon and Andrew. This is one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite passages in all of scripture. It’s playful, it’s creative, it’s poignant, and for me it’s personal. Whenever I hear the passage of the calling of the fisherman, I cannot help but connect it to my own family history. For generations, since they arrived off the boats from the shores of Ireland at the turn of the century, the men in my family did two things. They were either commercial fishermen and oystermen along the coast of the American South and mid-Atlantic, or, if they were clever and did well in parochial school, they went to seminary and became priests. I was fortunate enough to fall into the latter category, though if I had not become a priest, I like to think, perhaps with a degree of romantic naivete, that the life of a fisherman would have also suited me just fine. After all, the Gospel today reminds us that ministry and fishing are not so different after all. In many ways they draw on a similar set of skills, at least metaphorically.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.
Where is God?
When you think of him where does God reside?
Hold onto that first image that comes into your mind.
Dear friends and newcomers alike, today is finally the Eve of Christmas and we are gathered this evening to hear tell of the story that you have no doubt heard told countless times by now, in your life, and during this season of Advent. It’s the story of the fulfilment of a long-awaited promise. It’s the story of the light of hope breaking into the darkness in the least likely places. It is the story of the incarnation of God through the birth of Jesus Christ in the manger.
We have been thrown a delightful curveball this liturgical year in that Advent IV and Christmas Eve are coinciding, and so to do justice to these two theologically distinct observances, I invite you to suspend your ordinary sense of time with me during this service. Let’s try as best as we can to set down our thoughts about all of the wrapping that has yet to be done, the meals that need to be prepared, and the cookies that will get set out for Santa this evening. For now, let’s simply take this hour or so of calm before the storm to dwell in peace, in God’s time, which we share this morning with a most special guest. A guest whose humility, courage, and incredible faith are why we are able to celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus at all. Today we have the great honor of spending time with God in the presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Today is the first Sunday in Advent and we mark the beginning of a new liturgical year by entering a season of preparation for the arrival of our Lord, Christ Jesus, into the world. But how, exactly? And why? Didn’t Jesus already come to us through his miraculous birth to the Blessed Virgin Mary in a manger two thousand years ago? Even in our world where the Feast of the Incarnation, also known as Christmas, has become thoroughly commercialized, we still hear carols on the radio proclaiming the wonder of the nativity story in shopping malls, advertisements, and on the radio. As ubiquitous as Christmas is this time of year, it’s easy to take for granted the story of God’s arrival on earth as just that – a cozy story of a possible historic event that is a nice aesthetic embellishment to a season filled with so many other mixed symbols of ambiguous origin.
Last week I prepared an activity on contemplative prayer for the youth in our EYC group. My idea was to have all of us gather here in the nave on the eve of All Saints week, dim the lights, put on Gregorian chant, to invite our youth into a space of quiet contemplation in the hope that we might carve out time in our chaotic lives to simply be still, listen, and be present to God’s loving presence in our midst. The coup de grace of this contemplative moment was that we were going to light the thurible – our liturgical incense burner – and experience how the smoke, rising up like our prayers, can help prepare us for a bodily encounter with the divine.
On this Feast of All Saints, something incredible is about to happen. We are going to welcome someone special as the newest member of the Communion of Saints, which is the whole household of faith, past, present, and future. And we are going to do this by baptizing her in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. But first, what is baptism, exactly? What is going on when we do it?
If you had been contemplating tax evasion – or pledge evasion – this morning, the Gospel lesson may have complicated these plans for you. Today we hear the famous ‘render unto Caesar’ passage in Matthew, as it is translated in the King James Bible. The situation presented to us is this: the Pharisees come to Jesus and pose a question to him in bad faith. The question is whether it is lawful for faithful Jews such as themselves to pay taxes to the Roman emperor. Now, why is paying taxes for them a problem? Their problem is not the obvious financial inconvenience of taxes. Observant Jews at the time had no issue with the notion of taxes in general. Every adult Jewish male was expected to pay a modest tax for the work, worship, and upkeep of the Temple, that functioned much like our pledge to support the ministries of our parish today. Rather, the issue with paying Roman taxes was the moral dilemma of whether or not it was in their interest, as a colonized people, to pay taxes to their colonizers. Because the Roman empire had taken over the region of Palestine in the 1st century by use of military force, which, in a sadly familiar situation, resulted in much religious and political conflict.
The Episcopal Church is not known for having a lot of easy, straightforward answers to difficult questions, so you might be surprised to learn that in the back of the Book of Common Prayer, we actually do have a catechism, a helpful teaching tool with simple questions and answers explaining the basics of our faith. There’s a section explaining the Ten Commandments—it offers useful paraphrases that boil down the central teachings of the commandments: our duties to God, and our duties to our neighbor. But it’s the last question of the commandments that really interests me: “Since we do not fully obey them, are they useful to us at all?”
Last Sunday we heard the dramatic Exodus story of God delivering the Israelites from captivity in Egypt. Moses raises his arms, staff in hand, a fierce wind blowing, commanding the Red Sea to open, and it opens. The Israelites walk through on dry ground and just as they are on the other side, the water comes crashing down on their Egyptian oppressors. There is rejoicing all around. Moses’ sister Miriam, tambourine in hand, leads her people as they sing and dance, giving thanks to God for everything God has done for them. But almost before the last note is sung, all that exultation and joy turns to frustration and anger. God had wrought an incredible miracle in leading them out of Egypt, but then they enter the wilderness. They start a long journey to a new land of their own that God had promised them, an abundant land, a land “flowing with milk and honey”. But the people quickly discover that getting there is going to be hard work. They want to trust in God, but their anxiety about survival is choking their faith. They have forgotten all that God did for them to get them out of captivity. What they remember is the really good food in Egypt. They forget the part about being were slaves, they forget that they weren’t free. They used to have plenty of food, but here in the wilderness, they are free, but they are worried about where their next meal is coming from. God gives them bread, plenty of bread in fact, it meets their needs, but it is strange and not very tasty. There is more than enough for everyone each day, but they aren’t allowed to save any for the next day, so that they will learn to trust in God’s provision, day by day by day. Even the wilderness is a place of abundance because God is there, but they just can’t see it that way.
Today we hear one of the most iconic stories in all of scripture; the story of God delivering his chosen people, the Israelites, from the pursuit of their enslavers, the Egyptians. As we know, the story goes that God miraculously parts the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to cross to safety, while the Egyptian army is left scrambling in the muck until the sea comes crashing down upon them, swallowing them into the depths.
Last Saturday, thousands of people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. They came together to pay tribute to the landmark civil rights event in 1963 where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. They also came to stand against all of the current threats to the racial progress that we have made in this country over the last 60 years. Just as last Saturday’s March on Washington was ending, a young white man walked into a Dollar General store in a predominately Black neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida and killed 3 African Americans, 19 year old "AJ" Laguerre Jr., 29 year old Jerrald Gallion, and 52 year old Angela Carr. How utterly heartbreaking. The chasm between God’s dream for us and how things really are is so very great.
Good morning. For those who don’t know me, my name is Josh House, and I’ve been at Saint George’s for about 8 years. I’m also honored to say that I’m the most recent member of Saint George’s to be sponsored for ordination as a priest and to be sent to seminary.
This week I have been busy preparing so that everything is in order once I return from my wedding in two weeks. As I sat down to begin working on my sermon for this Sunday, I was hoping that the lectionary would throw me a soft ball that would help me in this task. Something nice and pleasant that I could maybe tie into love or nuptials, or going back to school, or these lovely days of late summer.
However, as we have just heard from the lips of our Lord, this optimistic wish of mine was not granted. Instead we receive today one of the most difficult and baffling passages in all of the Gospels. Let’s quickly revisit what was just proclaimed.
t has been heartbreaking to see and hear about the devastation in Maui this week in the aftermath of the wildfires that were sparked on Tuesday night. One man described the scene as a huge blowtorch blazing through his neighborhood at unimaginable speed. The beautiful, historic town of Lahaina, which was the capitol of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, is a wasteland. The remains of over 93 people have been found as of this morning and approximately 1,200 buildings have been burned to the ground. One of those buildings was Holy Innocents Episcopal Church, which had been there since 1927. It had a gorgeous painting of a Native Hawaiian Kanaka Madonna holding the Christchild. The Anglican Church, of which we are a part, has an interesting history in Hawai’i. Hawaiian King Kamehameha IV and his wife, Queen Emma, were Anglican. They invited the Church of England to establish the Church of Hawaiʻi, which was the state and national church of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi from 1862 until 1893, when the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown.
’m still getting used to the range of responses one gets while wearing a clerical collar in public. The other day while meeting a parishioner at a coffee shop I met a young woman working behind the cash register. As I gave her my order, I could tell that she was eyeballing me with the semi-perplexed look which I have come to recognize as the precursor to a question or exclamation about my clerical status. I simply smiled back and handed her my credit card, and after she returned it she beamed back at me and said: “that’s a really cool uniform; which restaurant do you work at?”
Our passage from Romans today is one of my absolute favorites. I have preached on it a number of times, usually at funerals, most memorably, my father’s. It seemed especially fitting for his service since I had heard him preach on it so often. He was a Baptist pastor and I still have a vivid picture in my mind’s eye of him standing in the pulpit, holding his Bible in his right hand, and giving witness to his faith in a very impassioned way. He never met a passage from one of Paul’s letters that he didn’t love.
Many of you probably know by now that I am hopelessly in love. Sure, with my wonderful fiancée Winnie, she is lovely and perfectly winsome and if I’m honest, probably not quite as lucky to be marrying me as I am to be marrying her. But that’s not what I am talking about. In addition to her, there’s something else that is wholly enrapturing to me and always has been. Something magnificent and arresting, something beautiful and fearsome, something strange and serene that compels me to drive three to five hours away nearly every weekend this time of year, just to catch a glimpse of it. I am in love with the ocean. Far more than leisure or the chance to work on my tan, being in that place where the land meets the sea is the closest I have found to the boundary between heaven and earth.
This past May, my husband Robbie and I were blessed to take a two week trip to Paris, and in the middle of our time there, we took a train to Amsterdam and stayed there for 3 days. The main reason that I wanted to go to Amsterdam was to visit the Van Gogh Museum. It was something of a pilgrimage for me, not in the same way as making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to walk the steps that Jesus walked, of course, but it was a sacred experience, because through many of Van Gogh’s works, I experience God at work in me.
Abraham said, You shall not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, in whose land I live; but you shall go to my father’s house, to my kindred, and get a wife for my son.’ Genesis 24 : 38
God said to Abraham: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”
Let’s just pause for a moment to take in the gravity of these words we have heard. The words we have just proclaimed “Thanks be to God” after hearing. God – the God of love; the God who granted Abraham and Sarah a miraculous son, Isaac, in their old age; the God who promised to make a great nation of Abraham, whose children will be “as numerous as the stars in heaven,” has now commanded Abraham to commit filicide, to kill his promised son.
This past week I had the real joy of spending time with four remarkable young men from our parish, JS Wilson, Nicholas Lowe, Sam Arny, and Nick West – and two multitalented chaperone-extraordinaires, Parks Gilbert and Matt West, on a service trip to Appalachia in a tiny mountain town that was incidentally called Appalachia located the westernmost part of Virginia, but not West Virginia. We were in the mountains. Each day we rose early in the morning and shared a brief devotion with our fellow service trippers before setting off for a shady holler where we spent the day rebuilding a rotted out floor for an incredibly hospitable older couple who had lived nearly their entire lives beneath the coal mine above us where the husband had once worked.
Saint George’s is on the move, out and about in a major way during the month of June. And that is happening in at least three different ways.
Good morning St. George’s! I am so overjoyed to be with you this morning as your new associate rector and I can’t express how grateful I am that you called me. It’s really a tremendous gift to be called to a community that is as vibrant, faithful, and downright fun as this one is, and to be honest it makes me feel a little spoiled, especially after hearing some of the call narratives in today’s lections, which I’ll touch on later. But first, I wanted to give you an update on something remarkable that happened in my life since I last saw you, and that of course is getting ordained as a deacon at the Cathedral in Boston last week. In this ordination ceremony I entered the church as a lay person, the bishop laid hands on me and called down the Holy Spirit, and I left the church, ordained as a deacon. So what exactly does that mean, being a deacon?