Musings of an Anglican/Episcopal Priest

Tag: sermons

Something from my wife…

I don’t know how I forgot to do this, but I want to point your attention to my lovely wife’s blog, and her post “Rules for listening to your spouse’s sermon.”  While it’s hilarious, there’s also a great deal of truth there… at least I know that I’ve sometimes caught an odd expression on her face and wondered “Oh no… what sort of heresy have I spouted unintentionally!” 😉

I might add that it takes almost as much effort to get used to preaching to a congregation that includes your significant other as it does to get used to hearing them preach.

Those who are not indifferent

Sermon Notes for Proper 21, 18 Pentecost, Year C
Scripture: Amos 6:1-7; 1 Tim. 6:11-19; Luke 16:19-31

Lazarus and the Rich manThe other day I had a conversation with the guy who cuts my hair, and he asked me if I’d heard about or had read the book entitled The Secret. I told him that I had heard of it but that I hadn’t read it (I didn’t tell him what I heard about it), and I was interested to hear what he would say. So he tells me his impression of this book. “It’s about energy” he said, “and everyone has positive and negative varieties. When you focus on bad things, bad things are attracted to you. When you focus on good things, good things come to you.” “So” he says, “you want a nice car, you just have to be positive and think that you’ll get that car and you’ll find a way to get it.” So things like getting sick and other bad things that happen to us are because of our negative energies.

You can see, probably, why such a belief would be popular in modern America. It’s practical, simple, easy to understand, and if something good happens, you get to take all the credit. And we have a lot of opportunities in our country for good things to happen to us. I’m not sure this idea would be so popular with or comforting to a cancer patient, or someone who’d just lost a loved one or had any number of bad things happen to them. “Too bad you’re going through that, guess you didn’t keep up on your positive energies.”

The whole frame of thought that The Secret and other examples of the “new thought” movement come out of is profoundly negative because it encourages people to self-aggrandizement, and to take credit and responsibility for things that are, in the nature of our world, largely or entirely out of our control.

Of course, this isn’t a new idea…you may have thought it sounded a bit like Karma in Hinduism, but it also bears similarities to some ideas that are present in scripture.

That’s right, these are biblical ideas. What I mean is that they are in the Bible, not that they are held up as good or commended. But we see examples of this when Job’s friends insist he must have sinned and brought his calamity upon himself. We see it in the Gospels when Jesus is asked about the man born blind: who sinned, this man or his parents? Of course Jesus doesn’t confirm their prejudices but instead sees it as an opportunity for the grace of God to be made manifest.

But people in that time, as much or more than people today, believed that people’s status in life and especially any disease or physical affliction they might have were a direct result of their (or their parents’) own moral fault or sin. That’s certainly what Jesus’ hearers would have been thinking when he started telling them the story of Lazarus and the rich man that we find in our Gospel reading this morning.

“Surely,” they’d think, “the wealthy man is blessed by God. Not only can he afford to wear white, but purple cloth as well–and cater such a feast daily! He must be truly holy.”
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Sermon for Proper 7c: In the Midst of the Storm

Last sermon given at Trinity Winchester

Scriptures: Zechariah 12:8-10;13:1; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 9:18-24; Psalm 63:1-8

I’ll never forget a conversation I had once. This person contacted me because he’d seen something I’d written and I suppose he saw that I was a Christian.

I can’t recall what I had been discussing or debating in my writing, and I doubt it was very important, but I remember this guy contacting me and starting to ask me questions about Jesus.

As we talked he stopped asking so many questions and instead started to “inform” me of some of the things he knew about Jesus, my answers having revealed my ignorance of several events he thought were very important for Jesus’ life and teachings.

For example. “Did you know,” he said, “that Jesus went to India…”

Well, no, I didn’t know that… it’s not in the Bible and I really don’t think there’s any evidence outside….”

“Well” he interrupted, “you know that Jesus was a Druid, right? He went to England and Ireland with his uncle Joseph of Arimathea and learned from the Druids while he was there…”

If the DaVinci Code had been written I would’ve been sure I was speaking to Dan Brown’s cousin…and if this guy had read it, I don’t doubt I would have gotten a nice summary of all its theories as well.

It became apparent in our conversation he believed any claim about Jesus except the ones found in the scriptures.

It didn’t matter how much effort I put into trying to explain how improbable it would have been for Jesus or any of his relatives to travel to Britain and back, to say nothing of the fact that the Jews, despite those lapses in the Old Testament, weren’t known for their openness to foreign religion, and I’m sure Jesus would have been even less so.

In spite of all my efforts, I’m not sure I changed anything. He may have left our conversation believing that Jesus was really a Hindu-trained Druid while I, well, I still believed he was and is who the Bible says he is—the Son of God, the Word made flesh, my Lord and Savior.

You see, we all want to claim Jesus as our own. But too often we want to claim him on our terms, as a sort of trophy or trump card for what we already believe, rather than on his terms as our Lord.

And of course if we can truly claim Jesus, it is not because we have chosen him but because, as he says, he has chosen us.

One of the great Christian ethicists of the last century, H. Richard Niebuhr once said that Jesus:

can never be confused with a Socrates, a Plato or an Aristotle, a Gautama (Buddha), a Confucius, or a Mohammed, or even with Amos or Isaiah. Interpreted by a monk, he may take on monastic characteristics; delineated by a socialist, he may show the features of a radical reformer; portrayed by a Hoffman, he may appear as a mild gentleman. But there always remain the original portraits with which all later pictures may be compared and by which all caricatures may be corrected. And in these original portraits he is recognizably one and the same. (Niebuhr, 13)

We live in a day and age when people are trying to justify many things in the name of Jesus. Too often by claiming a Jesus of their creation.

But this isn’t a new thing. And thankfully we’ve been given some guidance.

Consider our gospel lesson this morning, where Jesus asked his disciples “‘Who do the crowds say that I am?’ They answered, ‘John the Baptist; but others, Elijah; and still others, that one of the ancient prophets has arisen.’ He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered, ‘The Messiah of God.’”

There are lots of people out there claiming that Jesus is this or Jesus is that—that he’s John the Baptist, or Elijah, that he’s one of the Ancient prophets arisen.

Later on we know that there are enough people calling Christ a blasphemer and traitor to crucify him…

Today we might hear people saying “Jesus was a good man,” or “Jesus was a good teacher,” or “I like what Jesus said, but not what the Bible says he said…” Where exactly they’ve heard anything else legitimate, I don’t know.

We might hear people say that Jesus was a lot like Buddha—a good man who gives us a good example.

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No need to be perfect…just follow Jesus

Sermon for Proper 21b
Scripture: Mark 9:38-48
Theme: You don’t have to be perfect, just follow Jesus.

The Disciples are an interesting bunch. We can see that all through the New Testament… there must have been something about them that prompted Jesus to choose them as his closest followers and students. We get a glimpse of just how unique they are at the beginning of Mark’s gospel when he recounts how it was that Jesus called the first disciples to follow him.

Let me set the stage for you.

Mark opens strongly but differently than Matthew and Luke—he has no birth story… instead, like John the Evangelist, he opens with John the Baptist “baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4).

Mark provides us little background information about John—in the Gospel of John he is referred to as a “man sent from God.” In Mark, John simply “appears” as if from nowhere, “baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4).

In Mark’s Gospel, everything has a purpose, there are no extraneous details and you get the sense that we are going somewhere… toward a destination, with no false endings, no time to wait around and talk about unimportant things, about anything that doesn’t take you closer to the center of the whole story…

So when Mark takes the time to tell us how Jesus called the first disciples we know there is something important going on, something we’re supposed to learn… not only the sort of importance we might think of from the simple fact that these were Jesus’ first and closest disciples, but something in particular is important in the way they were called—in the way they reacted.

You could tell from their reactions… instead of asking Jesus a hundred questions about what he meant and who he was when he said to them: “Follow me,” they laid down their nets and followed.

So there was something that Jesus saw in each of his disciples, particularly the 12, his inner circle, that inspired him to choose them as his closest followers. And yet, they weren’t really that special, were they? I mean, no more special than anyone else… they were fishermen, and tax collectors…political dissidents and people working with the Roman establishment.

They were every-day people… and Jesus called them…

And they followed.

They followed him through his ministry, through the towns and villages, into the Synagogues and out into the desolate places where he prayed. They followed him when he healed, taught, prayed. They were faithful disciples of Jesus.

But they weren’t perfect.


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