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Showing posts from January, 2021

Sunday, January 31 - We renounce you

  This sermon was preached on Sunday, January 31 for a joint online service with St. Andrew's and St. Michael's. The text for this sermon was: Mark 1:21-28. A week or so ago, I was honored to baptize a dear friend’s newborn son. It was just the four of us—baby Jack, his parents, and me—around the small font in the chilly garden, but it was no less real or special. Though we kept the service brief, I took the time to go through the movements of the liturgy with my friends before we began. In every preparation session with parents, there’s that awkward moment when we get to the renunciations – one of the two sets of three questions we ask the parents and godparents to answer on behalf of their child. The questions, you may remember go like this:  “Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?”  “Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?”  “Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw yo

Unpreached Sermon, Sunday, January 10

In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on our Capitol on January 6, 2021, a video of a Black Capitol Police officer facing a mob of white supremacists went viral. [1] In the shakily captured frames, the lone officer retreats through the halls of the Capitol building. He is being screamed at and threatened by an angry, white, male crowd of Trump supporters. He has his hand on his gun but does not draw it, repeatedly calling for backup as he backs away from the crowd, up a set of stairs and left down a hall. A few days after watching that video for the first time, I learned some important facts that shifted my perception of the scene. [2] The officer's name is Eugene Goodman. He was, in fact, leading the crowd away from their targets in the Senate Chamber and toward where other police officers were ready and waiting. He was using his Black body, in his solitary vulnerability, to tempt a racist crowd to turn from their objective. In one moment in the video, a man at

Sunday, January 10 - Reaffirming our vows

This sermon was preached for Sunday, January 20, 2021 for a joint St. Andrew's and St. Michael's online service. The texts for this sermon were:  Genesis 1:1-5 ,  Acts 19:1-7 ,  Mark 1:4-11 , and  Psalm 29 .  We are a covenantal people. Since the publication of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the Episcopal Church has made it our practice to regularly return to the fundamental oath of our faith: the Baptismal Covenant. We say it whenever we participate in a baptism or confirmation. We rise to recite it year after year on the most special of Sundays: Easter, Pentecost, All Saints’ Day, and today, the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord.  As Episcopalians, the baptismal covenant constitutes the heart of what we believe it means to be Christian. We begin at this statement of faith, at these five questions. This is where the Gospel of Mark begins, too. Not with the baby in the manager, but with Jesus’ baptism. The voice crying out in the wilderness is the voice calling us to return to