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, June 2 - Stretch out

This sermon was preached for Sunday, June 2, 2024 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts of this sermon were: Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17, 2 Corinthians 4:5-12, and Mark 2:23-3:6. In Rabbi Sharon Brous’ recent book on faith, community, and connection, The Amen Effect, Rabbi Brous tells a story from one of her days as a seminary student. She describes being in the midst of a joyful worship celebration at the synagogue one Saturday. As the congregation burst into spontaneous dancing, she noticed a forlorn figure making her way to her. The woman explained to Brous that her mother had recently died. The mourner wanted to know if it was okay for her to join in the dancing. As a seminary student, Brous began making all sorts of calculations in her head: Jewish mourning customs would prohibit the daughter from dancing so soon after the mother’s death but at the same time, the dancing was in the context of worship…Finally, totally flummoxed and afraid of getting it wrong, Brous po...

Sunday, January 22, 2023 - Being the light

This sermon was preached for Sunday, January 22, 2023 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow, MA. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 9:1-4, Matthew 4:12-23, and Psalm 27:1, 5-13. My son receives the light of Christ at his baptism in 2021. Back when my husband and I lived in Berkeley, very soon after we had adopted our dog, Remy, we received some devastating news. It knocked the wind out of us on the way home from a party and we had no idea what to say to one another. I just remember being so filled with dread and grief that all we could do was lie on the floor in silence. We didn’t even turn on the lights or take off our shoes, just lay down on the carpet. Our dog, our new addition to our family, a rescue who was still learning to trust us, got up and lay down right between us. I remember being so surprised by how comforting her warm, furry body was. She was a light in the darkness to us in that moment. She didn’t need to understand why we were in shock....

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