Proclaim by Word and Example

This sermon was preached on Wednesday, April 25 at All Saints' Chapel, Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, CA for the Feast Day of St. Mark the Evangelist. The readings for this sermon were:  Isaiah 52:7-10 ,  Ephesians 4:7-8,11-16 ,  Mark 1:1-15 , and  Psalm 2 . One night, sophomore year of college, a group of my friends and I gathered around the television in the common room at precisely 8:00pm. We had all heard, through various means, that President Obama was about to make an address to the nation. No one had a clear guess as to what was happening, but it seemed very unlikely to be any sort of good news. A few minutes after 8:00, President Obama emerged to announce that Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda terrorist group, had been killed in an American military operation. This was, the President wanted to stress, Good News for all Americans. Amidst a swirl of images of American grief and unity after September 11th and the usual rhetoric about American exce

This sermon was preached for the Third Sunday in Easter at St. Aidan's, San Francisco. The readings for this sermon were: Acts 3:12-19 , 1 John 3:1-7 , and Luke 24:36b-48 . Touch me and see. One of my favorite podcasts, RadioLab , is in the middle of a compelling series on the science and politics behind why the US-Mexico border is the way it is. This week, the show looked into why the numbers of Latin American refugees found dead in the deserts suddenly jumped in the late 1990s--from 5-10 a year to over two hundred. It turns out that right around 1994, 1995, 1996, the US Border Patrol put into effect a major shift in their enforcement strategy. By amassing huge numbers of agents at certain points right along the border, the strategy deliberately channeled migrants away from the safer, traditional border crossings in the cities and into the harshest, cruelest environs along the border. See, policy-makers believed, and still believe, that the desert—and the inevitable deaths that