Sermons

  Easter 5 St. Alfred's May 6 & 7, 2023 Opening Getting lost Philip is feeling lost and wants to know the way to go. "Show me", he says, "Show me the way we should go." We were away for a couple of weeks in April. Our son was getting married up in South Carolina, and we took some time to visit with friends in the Carolinas and in Atlanta. The last one of those visits was scheduled to be lunch at a restaurant in a suburb of Atlanta. As soon as I drove up I knew that this was a popular place. There was not a parking place in sight. After driving around a couple of times, I dropped Mary Pat off at the door and headed back out to search out a parking space. After a few minutes she emailed the information posted at the door that there was free public parking across the street. I headed into it. It was below ground parking, so I headed down one level, then another, then I followed the signs for available spaces. I went around and over. I went down one dir...

  Maundy Thursday Sermon -- 2023 At the opening of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, he says > Jews ask for signs, and Greeks look for wisdom,  23  but we preach Christ crucified, 1 For Paul, everything he preached came down to "Christ crucified." That's more or less what I have to say tonight. Where I'm coming from When I reaffirmed my commitment to Christianity as a 20 something, I knew very little about the actual living out of being a Christian. I had read and meditated on a lot of things in college having to do with faith and spirituality generally. As my peers went off in a lot of different directions, things like: existentialism Hinduism agnosticism various sects and cults I decided that there was enough promising material in Christianity, stuff that seemed attractive to me: things like mysticism, a commitment to service to the most vulnerable, prayerful living in community, ... that I would commit my life to that until I couldn't g...

Spiritual autobiography of priesthood November 2022 From the time I first began to imagine myself as an ordained priest, sometime in my early 20’s, the worker priests in France were models of what I thought my ministry could be. A ministry aimed at the poor and the outcast, those who could least afford it, seemed most attractive to me. I was inspired by the stories I read about the emerging ministry with those who are dying, hospice as it emerged first in England. Such were the dreams of ministry I thought and talked about. My earliest memory of the Episcopal Church was of my uncle’s music ministry in Quincy, Illinois. He was the organist for the Cathedral there. I was proud that I had family connections with this grand church, “grand” at least to my 10 year old eyes. But along with that is the earliest memory I have of Episcopal preaching. The priest spent the whole sermon explaining why the church flag in front of the narthex stood one step higher than the American flag. I thought...

title: The Third Sunday of Easter  author: " St. Paul's, Monroe "  date: " May 1, 2022 " Opening ^1a "This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it." ( Ps. 118:24 ) So begins the well-known children's hymn. Today is the day the Lord has given to us. There will never be another like it. Count your blessings. Make every moment count. Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. Conversion During the season of Easter we hear from a series of readings from The Acts of the Apostles. Popularly this is known as the narrative of the birth of the church. It relates foundational episodes in the early years of the Jesus movement, known in its earliest manifestation as The Way . Today's reading introduces one of the most important episodes from that, the conversion of Saint Paul . The writer of The Acts of the Apostles -- the same author that gave us the Gospel of Luke -- ...

title: Easter 2c  author: St. Paul's, Monroe  date: April 24, 2022 April 24: The Second Sunday of Easter Lectionary Revelation For a long time I wanted to stay as far away from the last book of the Bible as I could get. Typically Christians that I didn't want to be associated with thought very highly of the last book in the Bible -- "The Revelation to John" -- and used it in ways that seemed inappropriate to me. Even before I had a very good understanding of what the book was all about I had the sense that using it as if it was a book of predictions, like Nostradamus, was an example of inappropriate use. At the same time I really didn't know what to make of it. Eventually I decided that what I needed to do was find out a little bit about the book, to read it to begin with, and then begin to explore the variety of ways that the book has been interpreted. One of the things to be learned about the book is that it is a prime example of a kind of writing called...

title: Janice Pyron Morris Funeral  author: St. Paul's, Monroe  date: April 19, 2022 Note: The liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy. It finds all meaning in the resurrection. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we too, shall be raised. The liturgy, therefore, is characterized by joy, in the certainty that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." This joy, however, does not make human grief unchristian. The very love we have for each other in Christ brings deep sorrow when we are parted by death. Jesus himself wept at the grave of his friend. So, while we rejoice that one we love has entered into the nearer presence of our Lord, we sorrow in sympathy with those who mourn. Opening The second to last chapter of the Bible begins an awesome vision that cu...

title: Christian Burial for Frank Gaertner  author: St. Paul's, Monroe  date: April 18, 2022 Opening It’s the day after Easter and drizzly out. We find ourselves gathered into a church, probably not the first thing we thought we'd be doing the day after Easter. Death personified I’m just one person and my experiences are limited by the fact that — well, it’s just me. But my experience of death is that it comes to us unbidden. Unwelcome. So often a surprise . Sometimes when a person has been in great pain and suffering, death is in fact longed for, but with some kind of rascally contrariness it takes its own sweet time. Death takes us by surprise. But, again, my own experience has been that, at such times, God’s presence is more palpable than at any other time. The bold, large, emotions are quite familiar to us then: laughter, tears, stories to tell, poignant memories silently remembered, faces of loved ones not seen in years. The boundary between God’s realm and our ...