Category: 2011 Sermons

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2011 Sermons

Lent 2 March 20, 2011

Genesis 12:1-4a                                                                  

John 3:1-17                                                                            

Yesterday I was back in Illinois to preach at the funeral of a lady named Elizabeth Carpenter, who died at the age of 98. Liz was the last of the founding members of St. Charles’ Episcopal Church. That I be the preacher for her funeral was one of the things she requested. It was a significant request, because Liz Carpenter had a difficult time accepting me as her new rector. You see, I came on the heels of the beloved Fr. Ludtke, founding rector of the St. Charles’ parish, who had served it for 33 years and then retired. There was one interim Sunday and then I arrived: my first parish. I was the new guy, full of seminary learnings, and I liked to make changes. Fr. Ludtke was the old guy, who had liked things to stay the same.

But Liz was a serious Christian. She believed in that Benedictine vow of stability which we talked about last week in the adult forum. This was her church and she was going nowhere. So she’d come to my office, sit herself down, produce a list from her purse, and we’d go through it item by item: why did I change this, why did I change that? And what happened was that Liz Carpenter learned to accept change, indeed to change herself. The present rector of St. Charles’ told me a story. A few weeks before she died, Liz was in church, sitting in her wheelchair at coffee hour. She was looking around at the coffee hour crowd and she said to Fr. Nesbit, “I don’t know all these people any more.” And then, after a pause, she added, “But I guess that’s a good thing.” A good thing for her church to grow and change.

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Lent 1 March 13, 2011

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7                                                      

Romans 5:12-19                                                                  

Matthew 4:1-11

I’ve told the story before, but it’s worth repeating. A rich man came to see me in the church I served back in St. Charles, Illinois, about a wedding for his daughter. They were nominal members of the more fashionable parish in the next town down the river, but they never attended church so the priest there had refused to do the wedding. Would I? The father would “make it worth my while.” What did my church need?

Well, I thought to myself: think boldly here, John. So, looking out the window of my study to the vacant expanse of lawn we owned, I said, “Well, we very much need to expand our education wing.” My visitor made a choking sound, so I quickly laughed said that I was only kidding; we’d be glad to do his daughter’s wedding and he could make whatever contribution he felt called to out of gratitude.

Needless to say, my relations with that man were never very good. He got my back up; I got his. We were operating, you see, out of completely different paradigms. He came from a successful corporate career, the world of commerce and power, where I offer something to you if you will do something in return. I will build you a ship (this had been this rich man’s most recent business) if you pay me so many hundreds of millions of dollars. The Church, however, operates (or is supposed to operate!) differently. For example, each Sunday we offer you a wonderful breakfast, a beautiful worship service, a helpful (we hope) message for your week, and the Body and Blood of Christ. And it’s entirely up to you what you do in response – moneywise or anything-wise. It’s all free gift.

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Ash Wednesday March 9, 2011

2 Corinthians 5:20b-21, 6:1-10                                       

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21                                                          

I’ve stuck in your bulletins this evening a copy of a little cartoon that Bishop Walmsley gave me on Sunday. It’s entitled, “The Rector responds to concern that Lent is a downer.” A priest is marking the cross of ashes on a kneeling parishioner’s forehead – as we will do in just a few minutes. She recites the words that I will recite, “Remember that you are dust,” but then she adds, “but a very high quality sort of dust.”

 This is funny, of course, because it points exactly to what Ash Wednesday reminds us of: we are dust and to dust we shall return, but not a higher or better or different kind of dust from any other dust. Just dust. That’s the point. Dust like all dust; dust like all matter.

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Last Epiphany March 6, 2011

2 Peter 1:16-21                                                                   

Matthew 17:1-9                                                                    

I don’t know about you, but as I go along through life there are little things people say to me or little things that happen – almost incidentally at the time – that I come back to again and again, that are so much more important than all the hours I spent in school or all my attempts to learn big truths.

One afternoon back when I was in seminary – this was in rural Wisconsin, country a lot like here – I was out on a walk with an old man who was a visiting teacher. He happened to be the retired Archbishop of Canterbury, but that isn’t really important to the story. It was mud season, which they have in Wisconsin like we have here. We were walking along this muddy road, looking up at the willow trees that were beginning to turn gold and some migrating geese honking their way north, and the beautiful spring sky. And all of a sudden, old Bishop Ramsay stumbled in a muddy spot, catching hold of my arm before he fell.

“This is a lesson, John,” he said. “In life you have to keep your eyes on the sky, but your feet in the dirt.” He was actually talking about life in the Church, but it’s true about all life: eyes on the sky, feet in the dirt. To live a happy and productive life, we need vision, goals, dreams, a horizon, hopes. But we also need to keep our feet on the ground, in the mud and the dust. Life is a lot of plodding along, one foot in front of another.

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Epiphany 8 February 27, 2011

Isaiah 49:8-16a                                                                    

Matthew 6:24-34                                                                  

I do the grocery shopping in our household, and that requires me about once a month to go into Petco to buy cat food and litter. The cat food and litter department requires me to walk past the birds and small rodents in their glassed cages: parakeets, canaries, parrots, mice, rats, hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, rabbits, ferrets. They’re all there each time I walk past them, doing their caged animal things: eating, sleeping, running on treadmills, hopping about, looking out at me as I look in at them. There’s something very sad about them: all these creatures have been bred and raised in captivity. They’ve never known anything other than the lives they’re living, safe but confined, in those glass cages. And I think what does that say about me? About all of us?

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Epiphany 6 February 13, 2011

This sermon was preached by Bishop Arthur Walmsley.

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Matthew 5:21-37

“Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him.”  — Deut. 30:19

Let me tell you about a young man named Ahmed.  We went with our daughter and a couple of friends in the fall of 2007 for a tour of the North African country of Morocco.  We had arranged the trip ourselves, and for the entire time we were in the country Ahmed was our guide and our driver.  As the trip went on, we got to know his story.  His father, whom we met along the way, was a lifelong tour guide.  Ahmed was ambitious, worked hard, went to university, got an undergraduate degree in economics, and later a master’s in computer science.  

But for him and literally hundreds of thousands of young people in the countries of North Africa and the Middle East there are no jobs commensurate with their education. As events have been unfolding in Egypt in the past three weeks, I have thought a good deal about Ahmed. We found out one day why he declined to have lunch with us; he would go off, roll out his prayer rug, and say noonday prayers because he was a faithful Muslim.  And so it appears as well that the energy in Egypt for the demonstrations in Tahrir Square has not been generated by violent Islamic fundamentalism but by the frustration of young people like Ahmed for whom their governments and their economies have no place for them.  That story is echoed by the countless journalists and others who have talked to the throngs of the young people who have been the energizing force of this non-violent revolution.  In Egypt, in Jordan, in Tunisia, in Yemen, there is a cry for change by the poor and the marginalized. In southern Sudan where our Anglican Church is very strong, upwards of 95% of the people last month voted to secede from an oppressive regime in Khartoum.  As Moses invites, Choose life and you and your descendants may live.

What does the Bible offer us as a way of responding to the global economic and social crises?

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Epiphany 7 February 20, 2011

This was one of our periodic “Come with Joy” Sundays. The readings were incorporated into a little skit, which follows. The skit served in lieu of a homily, with the congregation responding with comments afterwards.

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18

Matthew 5:38-48

Builders of Holy Lives

 

The Lord God enters, dressed in white, and proclaims the reading from Leviticus:

Hear this, my people: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy. When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not gather everything for yourself, but you shall leave something there in the fields for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God. You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another: I am the LORD.

You shall not cheat your neighbor and you shall not hold back fair wages for those who work for you. You shall not make fun of the handicapped or make life difficult for those who struggle; you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.

You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD.

You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

Hear, my people: I give you these blocks that you may follow my commandments and build yourselves lives that are holy, a just and peaceful world for all my people.

The Lord God departs, leaving a box of building blocks.

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Epiphany 5 February 6, 2011

This sermon was preached by Bishop Arthur Walmsley. The occasion was “Scout Sunday” and a number of scouts and leaders were present.

Isaiah 58:9b-12

Matthew 6:24-34

Once upon a time, an eleven year old boy thought he had lost his father.  There was a war on, and his dad who was in the army had been sent overseas.  With his mother and a younger brother, he had to move to a distant city know where they crowded into his grandparents’ apartment.  Going to an unfamiliar school was a real challenge; he was a scrawny kid, he was small for his age, he wore glasses, and he quickly became the butt of a gang of bullies which controlled his fifth grade classroom.  Luckily he could run faster than them, and mostly he paid no attention to the bullying.  Except that he was very lonely.

Someone suggested he might find friends at a boy scout troop located in a church up the street from his grandparents’ house.  He swallowed hard and went to a meeting, and to his surprise he found himself hooked.  He joined the troop, the scoutmaster took a real interest in him, and he discovered a world he had not known in the family or in school before then.  He belonged.

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Epiphany 4 January 30, 2011

Micah 6:1-8                                                                         

1 Corinthians 1:18-31                                                        

Matthew 5:1-12

Friends of mine, active Episcopalians, are trying out a new church. They’re tired of their big, rather safe and stuffy church. They’ve been visiting another Episcopal church in the city where they live: a mission founded to minister to people released from prison. It meets, they write, “in a drafty hall with folding chairs; the music is amateurish and in many genres; the service is one of several modernized versions of the Eucharist; the sermons we have heard have been full of energy and commitment. The place has a strong bent towards social action; it is interracial and clearly gay-friendly. The people are friendly and warm, clearly connected with each other, and clearly engaged in worship.  After the sermons, the priest hands around a mike and a few people talk about the sermon or the text, so far as we can tell in pretty real ways, connecting what they have heard to their lives.”

But my friends have one concern about this new congregation: “whether there is a discipline here and if so what it is.” By “discipline,” they mean what is the standard, the criterion, by which the life of the congregation is measured and held to account. And that’s a very important question; an important question for all churches, and for each of us as individuals. Is our “discipline” just what we like? What makes us feel comfortable or happy? The way we’ve done things in the past?

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Epiphany 3 January 23, 2011

Isaiah 9:1-4                                                                          

1 Corinthians 1:1-9                                                             

Matthew 4:12-23

I was talking with a friend who goes to an Episcopal church in Washington, D.C. He grew up a Baptist and has respect for that tradition, but he’s long been an Episcopalian and a very serious one. “I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t go to church, and especially Episcopal churches like mine and yours,” he said to me. “The words are beautiful, the music is beautiful; it’s the time each week I connect with God.”

“Well,” I responded, “it’s easier for me to list the reasons people don’t come to church than the reasons they do.” And I quickly gave him a dozen “don’t come to church reasons” off the top of my head: the competition of other activities, families where one parent doesn’t want to go, families where the kids are with their other parent every other weekend, the negative image churches and religion have in the media, bad experiences with churches in the past . . . and so forth. Really, when you think of all these reasons, that anyone comes to church here at Holy Cross on a Sunday morning, that we manage to keep this congregation alive and vital, is a miracle, given all the forces ranged against us.

It set me thinking, this conversation with my friend, about why I myself come to church; why even after I retire and am not paid to come, and have to go to a church that won’t be as close to what I personally love as this one is – why even then I will go to church every Sunday, pretty much no matter what. And the answer, for me as I thought about it, is really very simple:  I come to be with Jesus. I’m like those fishermen in the gospel reading this morning, to whom Jesus said, “Follow me.” It’s as simple as that. I long ago made the commitment, really out of desperation, to follow Jesus, to try to be with him.

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