Skip to main content

Moving to Substack

 Thank you for visiting Rev. Mia's sermon blog. I am moving to posting my sermons over on Substack, starting from Sunday, March 9, 2025. You can find them at https://proclaimia.substack.com/. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sunday, February 9, 2025 - This is happening

  This sermon was preached for the online virtual worship service of St. Andrew's for the fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 9, 2025. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 6:1-8,  1 Corinthians 15:1-11,  Luke 5:1-11, and  Psalm 138. In labor with my first child, my son, there came that moment when the midwife looked me in the eyes and said, “This next push will do it.” All of a sudden, the entire weight of the enormity of what I was doing - bringing a new human being into the world - came crashing down on me.  I just kept saying, I’m not ready, I’m not ready, I can’t do this. But I didn’t mean the pushing part, I meant all of it. I wasn’t ready to be someone’s mother. How could I ever have believed I could be someone’s mother. God bless my twin sister, who stepped in at that point, looked me in the eyes and said in her best matter-of-fact emergency room nurse voice, “Mia, this is happening.” She might have said something encouraging, too, like you’...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sunday, February 2, 2025 - Beautiful Things

This sermon was preached for the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord (Candlemas), Sunday, February 2, 2025 at St. Andrew's, Ayer. The texts for this sermon were: Malachi 3:1-4,  Hebrews 2:14-18,  Luke 2:22-40, and  Psalm 84. Sometimes a song will come to me as a background refrain to my days. This week, I found myself singing a particular song to my two-year-old at bedtime; a praise and worship song I learned a decade ago in the Episcopal Service Corps. It’s called Beautiful Things by Michael Gungor. The lyrics are simple enough for my toddler to begin picking up on the words. But what I really love about this song is that it begins with questions. Just as with so many psalms, these questions meet us in our very human wondering and doubt, in our grief and despair.  The songwriter, Michael Gungor, wrote Beautiful Things with his wife, Lisa, in 2011, when he was 30 years old. “All this pain,” the song begins. Looking around at the poverty, violence and desperat...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sunday, January 26, 2025 - Someone should

This sermon was preached for Annual Meeting Sunday, January 26, 2025 and references the January 21, 2025 sermon by the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Bishop of the Diocese of Washington. The texts for this sermon were: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10,  1 Corinthians 12:12-31a,  Luke 4:14-21, and  Psalm 19. Did you know that churches can be reviewed online, out of five stars and everything? Look up any church on Google maps and you can see how people - visitors and life-long members - rate the church from one to five stars and why. Facebook also has the ability for folks to review church pages. I find these reviews hilarious, but also somewhat unsettling. Church, after all, is not a product to be consumed or even a performance to be observed. Worship and liturgy is co-created, by everyone who shows up. You change a worship service the moment you step into it. You change a church with your presence. This is perhaps most obvious in small churches. Especially on Sundays like ...
Post a Comment
Read more