Proclaim by Word and Example

This sermon was preached for Sunday, July 28, 2024 for the tenth Sunday after Pentecost. The texts for this Sunday were: Psalm 14,  Ephesians 3:14-21, and  John 6:1-21. I have a lot of dear friends who are mothers to newborns right now - I celebrated FIVE new babies born to close friends in this past year alone. So I've been thinking a lot lately about the fraught history of how we feed babies. Excuse me while I recount a tiny slice of the history of American breastfeeding here - while acknowledging that it's history many of you may have lived through in very intimate ways.  In the 1960s and 1970s, most American babies were not breastfed. As little as 22% of American infants born in 1972 were breastfed. This all had to do with the advent of good baby formula, but as solid scientific evidence about the benefits of breastfeeding and breastmilk emerged, governments began to enact policies to counteract the decline in breastfeeding. In 1991, the year I was born, the Worl...

This sermon was preached for Sunday, July 14, 2024 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Psalm 24,  Ephesians 1:3-14, and  Mark 6:14-29. I can’t read today’s Gospel story about the beheading of John the Baptist without thinking of the strangest party I ever attended. Some context: I was studying abroad during the first semester of my college’s Arabic language program in Amman, Jordan. Now this program had been rather hastily put together after my college’s established Arabic program had been evacuated during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. The director of our program, in scrambling to find last-minute housing for the female students, had had to forgo the usual placing of students with host families and instead selected a women's dormitory near the University. It’s important to the story to note that director chose our particular dorm because it had the latest curfew out of all the female dorms near the University - the absolut...