Proclaim by Word and Example

This sermon was preached for Christmas Day on Sunday, December 25, 2022 for St. Mark's Episcopal Church. The text for this sermon were:  Isaiah 9:2-7,  Luke 2:1-20, and  Psalm 96.  Auggie Kano prepares for the St. Andrew's Christmas Pageant, December 2021 Last year, my son August, then about six months old, played the baby Jesus in my previous parish’s pageant. It had been years since St. Andrew’s Church had had a real live baby in the Christmas pageant - the parish had long ago opted for the simpler, more peaceful doll Jesus, which had worked just fine. But after almost two full years of pandemic isolation and the painful segregation of the young and old, the impact of a squirming, breathing, actual infant at the pageant was tangible and profound. Several parishioners wanted me to know that my son’s presence there in the arms of the teenage Mary brought the Christmas story home to them in a way they hadn’t known they had been missing. A couple folks said having a re...

This sermon was preached for Christmas Eve on Saturday, December 24, 2022 for St. Mark's Episcopal Church. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 9:2-7,  Luke 2:1-20, and  Psalm 96.  Madonna, Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1300 Have you ever looked at a Madonna and Child painting from the Medieval or Renaissance era and thought that baby Jesus looked a little…odd. Like an infant with old man jowls and wise eyes…looking closer to newly retired than newly born. In one depiction by the Italian artist Duccio from 1300, Jesus has the full-on proportions and clothing of a miniature adult man plopped on Mary’s lap. Author John Greene poked fun of this Christian art quirk with his art rating game, “Has this artist ever even seen a baby?”  Turns out this was a thing though, what art historians call “Homunculus” - Latin for tiny man. Rather than bad art, these artists were making the theological statement that baby Jesus was always 100% God - all-knowing and wise from the start -...

  This sermon was preached for Sunday, December 18, 2022 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. The texts for this sermon were  Isaiah 7:10-16 ,  Romans 1:1-7 ,  Matthew 1:18-25 , and  Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18 . This is my first Sunday back with you after the birth of my daughter. As my leave ended on Wednesday, twelve weeks from her arrival, my husband’s parental leave from his job began. He was chatting with one of his colleagues (who doesn’t have kids) about the next three months when she asked him whether he was planning any trips or fun adventures now that he didn’t have work. He just laughed and laughed. Having been through a parental leave before and having just supported me through another with a newborn and a toddler, Aaron knows perfectly well that leave is not a time of expanded horizons, opportunities to travel, or any free time to speak of.  If anything, parental leave is, in our experience, a shrinking down of one’s world to...