Moving to Substack

Thank you for visiting Rev. Mia's sermon blog. I am moving to posting my sermons over on Substack, starting from Sunday, March 9, 2025. You can find them at https://proclaimia.substack.com/.

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Sunday, July 28, 2024 - Fed is Best

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...

Sunday, May 19, 2024 - Holy Listening

This sermon was preached for Day of Pentecost Sunday, May 19, 2024 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Acts 2:1-21, John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15, and Psalm 104:25-35, 37. May God’s word only be spoken and God’s word only be heard. In seminary and priest training, we spent just about as much time learning how to listen well as we did learning how to speak and teach. This is because the key to all loving relationships is skillful listening. And good connection is all about listening to understand rather than listening to respond. Now one of the most important types of listening priests and chaplains-in-training are drilled on is called reflective listening. At its most basic, reflective listening is simply reflecting back to the people what they just said. Your response is your understanding of what they said. Done without skill, it can sometimes land as sort of annoying. Yes, yes, that’s what I said. But the deeper skill to reflective listening is ...

Sunday, January 29 - Student Human Being

This sermon was preached for Sunday, January 29 for Annual Meeting Sunday at St. Mark's Episcopal in East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were Micah 6:1-8 and Matthew 5:1-12. Picture this: you’re driving along and the car in front of you does something rather ill-advised. For instance, they slow down suddenly for no reason or change lanes abruptly. But just when you start to feel irritation and annoyance bubble up inside you, maybe even some choice words spring to your mind, you notice there’s a sticker on the bumper that says… “Student driver.” How do you feel now? I often notice that when I spot one of those stickers, my attitude shifts. I’m brought back to when I was a student driver at 17, unsure and anxious, when all the parts of driving that come so automatically now - checking mirrors, turn signals, changing lanes - were conscious, stressful maneuvers. I suddenly have a whole lot more compassion for the driver of the car in front of me. I slow down and give them space....

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