Proclaim by Word and Example

This sermon was preached for Sunday, October 13, 2024 in St. Andrew's, Ayer. The texts for this sermon were: Job 23:1-9, 16-17,  Psalm 22:1-15,  Hebrews 4:12-16, and  Mark 10:17-31. Appalachia has been on my mind and heart and prayers quite a bit lately, especially the swaths of Tennessee and North Carolina hardest hit by Hurricane Helene. My own first encounters with the region were in high school, when my church youth group served with the critical home repair ministry, the Appalachia Service Project, for a week each summer. Later in college, I worked as a summer staffer for that same ministry, this time hosting the groups of churches who’d rotate through our center each week to do basic repair work on homes and trailers in the surrounding hollers. As staffers, we’d oversee and assign the multi-week projects, so we’d get to know the families we were serving pretty well. That summer - that work and those relationships - forced me to confront the heart-breaking complexities of Ame

This sermon was preached for Sunday, October 6, 2024 at St. Andrew's, Ayer. The texts for the sermon were:  Job 1:1; 2:1-10,  Psalm 26,  Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12, and  Mark 10:2-16. That is not the Gospel I would have chosen for my first sermon with my new church, if it was up to me. It’s a doozy on any Sunday but especially when you don’t know the people you are preaching to very well. I don’t know who among you has been hurt by divorce, and who has been saved by it. I don’t know who struggles with the boxes of male and female, or who has been wounded by the Church’s historically strict vision for what marriage should or can be. I don’t know how this passage has been preached or interpreted to you before - full judgment or with abundant grace. But if this passage feels like a bit of a trap, it’s because it is one. The Pharisees pose this question about divorce to Jesus precisely because it was contested and controversial, in their day and still in ours. The leaders are asking not so