Proclaim by Word and Example

This sermon was preached for Sunday, June 26 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were:  Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20 ,  Galatians 5:1,13-25 , and  Luke 9:51-62 . Over vacation, I watched a Netflix documentary on a break-away polygamist sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and the devastating impact of their two so-called prophets, Rulon Jeffs and son, Warren Jeffs. The last scene of the four part series is one of those voiceover reenactments, retold by one of the dozens of young wives of the elderly prophet, Alicia Rohbock. In it, Alicia describes how she finally decided to escape from the religious society that controlled her body, kidnapped her children, and dictated every aspect of her life, down to her underwear and the style of her hair. Her mother and her brother helped her pack up all her belongings in a trailer truck. As she drove away behind the truck, she watched as the trailer doors flew open and all her belongings ...

This sermon was preached for Trinity Sunday, June 12, 2022 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were:  Romans 5:1-5 ,  John 16:12-15 , and  Psalm 8 . A couple of years ago a teen riding an old rusted bike with no brakes crashed into an older gentlemen’s car and dented it. A few days later, the owner of the car returned and presented the teen with a brand new bike with brakes. A photo of the presentation of the gift was passed around the internet - in it, the boy is clearly extremely touched by the older man’s gift, hiding his teary face in his hands. The photo made the rounds again in 2021 and popped up again on thousands of people’s feeds this week. I suspect the reason this picture keeps getting shared is not just that it is an uplifting moment in a time of stress and strife between generations. It may also be because so many of us can recognize ourselves in the two people: in the young kid who made a mistake, limited by the inadequ...

This sermon was preached for the Day of Pentecost, June 5, 2022 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow, MA. The texts for this sermon were:  Acts 2:1-21 ,  John 14:8-17, (25-27) , and  Psalm 104:25-35, 37 . When I lived in the Middle East for the first time, I was part of an immersive language program. We took a pledge to only speak, read, and write in Arabic for four months. So during that time of no English, I got to know a Jordanian university student purely in his native tongue. He was extraordinarily patient with my bumbling Arabic and taught me a great deal about his city, his culture, and most importantly to both of us, his Islamic faith. My new friend was a caring guide to a foreign world with strange perspectives that stretched my mind and heart. I knew him as intelligent, hilarious, and exceedingly chivalrous.  Then, on that last day in Amman, after our final ceremony releasing us from the pledge, I turned to my friend to have my first conversation with him in Engl...

This sermon was preached for the Seventh Sunday after Easter, May 29, 2022 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Acts 16:16-34, Psalm 97, and John 17:20-26. Next to the entrance for fourth and fifth graders at my elementary school, there was a small memorial garden filled with pretty flowers and colorful pinwheels, planted by the parents of a young boy who had died. It might seem a little strange to have small children walk past a reminder of the mortality of children at the start of each day. But here I have to remind you that I grew up as an American schoolchild in the 90s and early 2000s. I was in fourth grade when the shooting at Columbine high school happened; the garden sat right outside the doors we were trained to lock and the desks we learned to huddle behind in active shooter lockdown drills. By the time I was 10 years old, I was already being asked to confront the reality that going to school meant I could be in danger of dying by a gun wielded ...

This sermon was preached for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 22, 2022 by the Rev. Mia Kano. The readings for this sermon were Acts 16:9-15, Psalm 67, and John 14:23-29. In the early 1950s, a down and out kid named Gary kept showing up at a small library in Chicago. His parents were absent and neglectful, swallowed up by alcoholism, and so for this young teen, the library became a sanctuary. Years later, Gary reminisced about the library in an interview with NPR , “The librarian - she watched me for a while. I was kind of this urchin, you know, a street urchin. Then she finally said, you want something? I said, nah I'm OK. And she gave me a card and - hard to talk about it. It was a card with my name on it. And, God, nobody had given me a - anything like that. Nobody gave me anything.” The librarian also gave him books, starting out with one book a month and then one book a week. In turn, he would tell her his own imaginative stories, which he called thought pictures. Then one day,...

This sermon was preached for Sunday, May 15, 2022 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church by the Rev. Mia Kano. The texts for this sermon were: Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:31-35. A couple weekends ago, I took my previous parish’s youth group on a local service trip called CityReach. The program connects teens and adult volunteers with the work of common cathedral, an outdoor church community for the unhoused in Boston - very similar to everything I’ve heard about your work here with Church Without Walls. The power of CityReach is that the program is led by folks who either currently live or have lived on the streets of downtown Boston. For that weekend, they are our teachers. Our guide led us on a tour of the streets of Boston through the eyes of someone who had grown up sleeping in its alleyways, busking on its street corners, and shuffling in and out of prison. On Saturday, volunteers give out clothing donations and food to guests - “family members we haven’t met yet” as our priest Rev. Mary...

This sermon was preached for Good Shepherd Sunday, May 8, 2022 at St. Mark's Episcopal CHurch, East Longmeadow. The readings for this day were:  Acts 9:36-43 ,  John 10:22-30 , and  Psalm 23 . Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death… At one of my learning parishes, the rector came into my office a bit baffled. He had just been meeting with a family loosely connected with our parish whose relative had died. They had been selecting hymns and readings, and doing all the preparation work required for the upcoming funeral. Knowing the family was relatively unchurched, my priest pulled out the old funeral standby, Psalm 23. But the family balked. The Psalm, you see, included the word death in it. Too depressing, the family decided. Who wants to dwell on death? My rector at the time was never one to tell someone how they should, or shouldn’t grieve. But he was, understandably, wondering a bit about how to get through a funeral without touching on the subject...