Proclaim by Word and Example

This sermon was preached for the Third Sunday after Epiphany, January 23, 2022 at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. The texts for this sermon are:  Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 ,  1 Corinthians 12:12-31a ,  Luke 4:14-21 , and  Psalm 19 . I have a confession to make. I’m on TikTok now. Yes, it’s yet another social media platform. Yes, it’s majorly addictive. And I would say that it’s part of my job to be where the new generation of young people are. I could claim it's important for a youth minister to understand the social media worlds young people are immersed in...except that it was totally my sixty-year-old retired father who convinced me to finally install the app.  You don’t have to spend a long time on TikTok, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, or Reddit or any of the other internet community spaces or social media platforms to realize that people are profoundly confused about what Christianity is. People aren't sure what the church stands for or what Jesus’...

  This sermon was preached for the Feast of the Epiphany, Sunday, January 9, 2022 at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Wellesley. The texts for this Sunday were:  Isaiah 60:1-6 ,  Ephesians 3:1-12 ,  Matthew 2:1-12  and  Psalm 72:1-7,10-14 .  Take a moment to picture the magi. What comes to mind for you? Perhaps it is the feel of the smooth, carved wood of your childhood nativity set. Or maybe you're remembering children in play crowns and fabric turbans, trooping up a church aisle. Or majestic silhouettes on Christmas cards.  Either way, my guess is that three figures come to mind. Though Matthew’s account doesn’t say how many magi there were exactly, the Christian tradition has coalesced around three kings simply because there were three gifts. Over the centuries, we’ve given the three names and stories, made them heroes for us to celebrate. In most contemporary depictions, the three journeying kings stride forth alone, perhaps with a couple of cam...

This sermon was preached for the Third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Wellesley, MA. The texts for this sermon were:  Zephaniah 3:14-20 ,  Philippians 4:4-7 ,  Luke 3:7-18 .  When I first started out preaching seven years ago, I’d get really nervous before each sermon. Let’s be real – I still do. But back then I’d bug my rector at the time so much with my nervousness that one day he got fed up. Instead of asking me to calm down though, he told me to close my eyes and focus on what I was feeling. Had I ever noticed that the experience of nervousness – the bodily, physical sensations – are not actually too much different from the experience of excitement? What if I stopped for a second and decided to be excited instead? It was so simple – and yet a profound shift. Instead of trying to change what I was feeling – the tightness and tingling and butterflies – I changed the story I was telling myself about those emotions. He taught me t...

This sermon was preached for the Feast Day of St. Andrew on Sunday, November 21, 2021 at St. Andrew's, Wellesley. The texts for this sermon are:  Deuteronomy 30:11-14 ,  Romans 10:8b-18 ,  Matthew 4:18-22  and  Psalm 19 . Part of training to become an Episcopal priest is a stint as a hospital chaplain - and part of hospital chaplaincy training is a practice called “verbatims.” It’s when you sit down with some fellow student chaplains and analyze a conversation you’ve had with a patient. Now, as the name suggests, this is done quite literally word for word. Let me tell you, having your colleagues pick apart your words is just as intense and vulnerable as it sounds. One of my turns, a colleague pointed to a prayer that I had prayed a million times – something like “Be present, God, with this family.” “Hang on,” my colleague said, “Why do you ask God to be present? Doesn’t this imply that God might not be there yet?” I couldn’t stop thinking about his critique as I...

On October 13, a woman was attacked in a Philadelphia subway in broad daylight, in front of several other passengers. [It was widely reported] that the assault lasted several minutes before anyone intervened - although some commuters turned their phones to record the incident. People saw and did nothing.  This is not the first time something like this has happened and it won't be the last. But it garnered national news because people fretted that this type of incident may be the way we are now, after months of self isolation and self protection and the breakdown of social mores. Have we forgotten how to be together in a public place? Who we are in a crowd? T here is a well-documented psychological phenomenon called the bystander effect . Its basic assertion is that people are more reluctant to intervene in an emergency when others are present. In fact, the more people there are, the less likely any individual is to help any other person in trouble.  There are so many barriers...

  This sermon was preached at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Wellesley on Sunday, October 3, 2021. The reading for this sermon is Mark 10:2-16.  I can’t hear this Gospel proclaimed without thinking of a particular moment in my seminary chapel when it came up in the lectionary to be read. In that sanctuary, the Gospel was proclaimed right in the center of the aisle, in the midst of the students and professors. This particular Thursday night, the reader had just gotten to the part of this passage about the parents bringing their children to Jesus, when a squirmy toddler sprang free of his mother’s arms. And as the line “Let the little children come to me” was read, the just-barely-walking child tripped, tottled, crawled straight up the center aisle toward the reader, reaching, reaching with his little arms toward the speaker of Jesus’ words, shrieking with joy. The escapee was soon snatched up by the back of the overalls by his mother but not before my pewmates and I shared a gr...

  This sermon was preached for St. Andrew's Episcopal Church on Sunday, September 12, 2021. The text for this sermon is Mark 8:27-38. This past week the New York Times Arts section ran a story about a new exhibit at the American Kennel Club’s Museum of the Dog. Opening in time for the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks, the exhibit memorializes the hundreds of rescue dogs who searched for survivors amid the wreckage of Ground Zero. The dogs ranged from tiny rat terriers to German shepherds and golden retrievers. They and their handlers worked 12 hour days, in some cases for 10 days in a row.  But they found no survivors.  In fact, their desperate search was so fruitless that the handlers had to stage “mock finds” so the dogs wouldn’t get too discouraged.  But the exhibit also commemorates how the dogs served in another way. Anyone who has ever had a relationship with a dog would not be surprised to learn that the dogs became a source of comfo...