Proclaim by Word and Example

  This sermon was preached for Sunday, July 23, 2023 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Genesis 28:10-19a,  Psalm 139: 1-11, 22-23, and Matthew 13:24-30,36-43. Like a lot of churches, like St. Mark's in fact, the first parish I was a part of had a ministry to a handful of local care institutions, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities - a Eucharist for folks there once a month. All lovely places with lovely people. But there was this one nursing and rehabilitation center just down the street from the church that we hadn’t managed to visit in years. It had fallen on hard times; the staff there did their best but it was poorly funded and there was high turnover so the services were difficult to coordinate. Many of their permanent residents - older folks with dementia, young folks with brain damage, folks suffering from the irreversible effects of alcoholism, drug use, and poverty - were not there by choice. They were...

This sermon was preached for Sunday, July 16 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. The texts for this sermon were: Genesis 25:19-34,  Psalm 119:105-112, and  Matthew 13:1-9,18-23. Back in 2010 and 2011, Snickers ran an award-winning series of ads featuring celebrities in silly situations. In the most famous ad, a bunch of young guys are all playing tackle football in a muddy park. In the midst of them is an 88 year old Betty White, getting tackled left and right, fumbling the ball all over the place. The guys give her a hard time in the huddle until her girlfriend comes over and hands her a Snickers bar. With one bite, Betty White transforms into an athletic young guy like the rest and feels much better. The ad ends with the tagline, “You aren’t you when you’re hungry.” As someone who lives in a house with a toddler, a baby, and a husband who all have a tendency to become quite irritable when hungry, I can attest to the truth of that tagline.  Betty White's Snickers Ad, 20...

  This sermon was preached for Sunday, July 9, 2023 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. The texts for this sermon were: Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67 and  Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30. One of my wisest spiritual teachers, my son’s godmother, recommended the documentary My Octopus Teacher to me recently. It’s a captivating and relaxing 85 minutes about a filmmaker, Craig Foster, who observes a solitary octopus and her South African kelp forest for a year. When Foster first catches sight of the octopus, he notices her using a very strange method of defending herself. His immediate thought is, “There is something unusual here, there is something to learn.” So he returns again and again to the same small piece of kelp forest to get to know this creature. He remarked that others seemed a bit baffled why he kept returning to the same shallow patch of the South African coastline when there was a whole ocean to explore. But he’s adamant - returning every day for a year allows Foster to ...

This sermon was preached for the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Sunday, July 2 at St. Mark's. The text for this sermon were: Genesis 22:1-14, P salm 13, and  Matthew 10:40-42. You wouldn’t know it by looking at me now, but I used to be quite a serious athlete in high school. Three season varsity runner - and with running, it’s really four seasons - you’ve got to train and train hard all through the summer, too. One summer, I was pushing 35, 40, 45 miles a week, too fast and too hard, and gave myself shin splits - tiny tears in the connections between my leg muscles and bones. Now if you push through shin splints it can turn into what’s called a stress fracture - the strain and stress of the tears results in tiny fractures in the bones themselves. And that’s exactly what I did.  The doctors injected this dye and used x-rays to show that yup, my punishing training regimen was literally breaking my bones. As we reviewed the results, my doctor nonchalantly suggested that I sho...