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, 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 ...

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