Proclaim by Word and Example

This sermon was preached for Trinity Sunday, May 27, 2018 at St. Paul's, Mount Lebanon, PA. The readings for this sermon were:  Isaiah 6:1-8 ,  Romans 8:12-17 ,  John 3:1-17, and   Psalm 29 . Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!” Every year, the night before the first day of school, my father would enact the same little ritual with each of his three girls at bedtime. Dad would come and sit on the end of our beds and ask my sisters and me the same three questions every year. “What’s your job?” he’d ask. “To learn,” we’d answer. “What’s your teacher’s job?” “To teach.” “How can you make you and your teacher’s jobs easier?” “Ask questions!” we’d all say, sometimes too excited to let our father finish his sentence. And ask questions we did. At my father’s encouragement, we knew that asking questions didn’t mean we were slow or left behind. It wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about. It ...

This sermon was preached on Sunday, May 13 for my last Sunday at St. Aidan's Episcopal Church. The readings for this sermon were: Acts 1:15-17, 21-26, 1 John 5:9-13, John 17:6-19 and Psalm 1 .   Their delight is in the law of the Lord, and they meditate on God’s law day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither. Two Novembers ago, when the results of the national election were becoming clearer and clearer, the first thought I had was, “We need to open the Chapel.” And open the seminary Chapel we did, posting on our seminary Facebook page and then my own, that the light was on and the doors were open. A place to pray and be held in prayer. To my surprise, dozens of friends from all different parts of my life liked my status. Christian friends, Jewish friends, friends I’m pretty sure have never stepped foot in a church, acquaintances I had not spoken to in years. Somehow, even though they were al...

This sermon was preached on Wednesday, April 25 at All Saints' Chapel, Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, CA for the Feast Day of St. Mark the Evangelist. The readings for this sermon were:  Isaiah 52:7-10 ,  Ephesians 4:7-8,11-16 ,  Mark 1:1-15 , and  Psalm 2 . One night, sophomore year of college, a group of my friends and I gathered around the television in the common room at precisely 8:00pm. We had all heard, through various means, that President Obama was about to make an address to the nation. No one had a clear guess as to what was happening, but it seemed very unlikely to be any sort of good news. A few minutes after 8:00, President Obama emerged to announce that Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda terrorist group, had been killed in an American military operation. This was, the President wanted to stress, Good News for all Americans. Amidst a swirl of images of American grief and unity after September 11th and the usual rhetoric abou...

This sermon was preached for the Third Sunday in Easter at St. Aidan's, San Francisco. The readings for this sermon were: Acts 3:12-19 , 1 John 3:1-7 , and Luke 24:36b-48 . Touch me and see. One of my favorite podcasts, RadioLab , is in the middle of a compelling series on the science and politics behind why the US-Mexico border is the way it is. This week, the show looked into why the numbers of Latin American refugees found dead in the deserts suddenly jumped in the late 1990s--from 5-10 a year to over two hundred. It turns out that right around 1994, 1995, 1996, the US Border Patrol put into effect a major shift in their enforcement strategy. By amassing huge numbers of agents at certain points right along the border, the strategy deliberately channeled migrants away from the safer, traditional border crossings in the cities and into the harshest, cruelest environs along the border. See, policy-makers believed, and still believe, that the desert—and the inevitable deaths that...

This sermon was preached on Thursday, March 29, 2018 for Maundy Thursday at St. Aidan's, San Francisco. The texts for this sermon were:  Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14 ,  1 Corinthians 11:23-26 ,  John 13:1-17, 31b-35 , and Psalm 116:1, 10-17 When I was trained as a Godly Play teacher a few years ago, I learned that an essential part the Montessori-inspired children’s curriculum is what’s called “work time.” After the teacher physically acts out a Bible story with small figurines, the children are invited to play with the props themselves. After sitting impatiently through the story, they’re finally invited to wiggle their fingers in the sand of the Exile story, smell the chrism scent of the Baptism oil, and spill water all over the floor. Contained in this teaching method is an understanding that the act of retelling a story ourselves, with our bodies and voices, is a key part of learning. As a Christian educator, I also used other Sunday school curricula that suggeste...

This sermon was preached at Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, MA for the fifth Sunday of Lent. The sermon texts were: Jeremiah 31:31-34, Hebrews 5:5-10, John 12:20-33 and Psalm 51:1-13. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. I feel so fortunate to be able to return to Grace a few times every year and I’m honored to be invited to share the Word with you this morning. I’ve been tickled to hear about all that you are up to and to admire from afar all the numerous ways this church continues to flourish since I served here as an intern two years ago. I have scarcely been more proud of this church than this past week, hearing about our teens and youth from our parish and Diocese. They joined countless other young people in walking out of classrooms, petitioning legislators, and demanding meetings with gun manufacturers--even when all this pesky snow got in the way. Although...

This sermon was preached on March 4, 2018 for the Third Sunday in Lent at St. Aidan's, San Francisco. The texts for this sermon were:  Exodus 20:1-17 ,  1 Corinthians 1:18-25 ,  John 2:13-22 , and  Psalm 19 . It sounds weird to say looking back, but I never would have expected, given my upbringing and childhood church, that my way back into Christianity would have been through getting to know the person of Jesus Christ. What I love about Christianity, of course, is that there are so many ways in, so many ways God reaches out to those who feel far from divine love--through the Holy Spirit, the Scriptures, the warm welcome of a loving community. So I blame the brothers at Society of St. John the Evangelist in particular for setting me up with Jesus. The kind, gentle, black-robed Anglican monks of Cambridge have it out to introduce the world to the power of relationship with God through friendship with Jesus. This Lent, in particular, they’ve outdone themselves with ...