Sermons

Sermon: Sept. 24: St. Peter’s The Gospel today sounds like an offense to the best of our human instincts regarding fairness and justice. Jesus: King. of Heaven is like laborers went out into the field … working various lengths. … so the last shall be first and the first last. … None of us can hear the parable about the Kingdom of Heaven without first reacting – wait? what? … that’s a sign that we may be on to something. On Easter this past Spring I preached at the church in Rock Hill. In it I tried to evoke the wonder and depth and significance of what we proclaimed on that night. In the course of it I recalled a commencement speech that had been given a year earlier by the dean of Harvard Graduate School of Education. It was filmed and shared on YouTube where it came to be viewed by millions of people – going viral I guess it’s called. The key words of the commencement message that I wanted to focus on was a pair of words that are sometimes spoken by children and young adults whe...

Sermon: Proper 19 – Sept. 17 St. Paul’s, Monroe Forgiveness as the source of life I’m thinking of the philosophers and scientists pursuing the question of how life began, how human beings were created, where it all started. We were reminded of some of this in the past few days and weeks as the Cassini space craft was completing its 13 year mission to Saturn. I read about how some of the things discovered during this remarkable ended up giving us new information about life could have beegun. But in spite of all the new information we have about the origin of life, I am led to a curious conclusion. The beginning of everything we need to know about human life is really to be found somewhere else. Today I want to put before you the proposition that life really comes from a process of forgivenness. Consider the central role forgiveness plays in the foundational story of the patriarchs – in particular Joseph and his brothers. We get a little flavor of that in the episode we hear t...

14th Sun. after Pentecost St. Paul’s, Monroe, NC September 10, 2017 Greetings and introduction Greetings from my wife and me. Greetings from Rock HIll where we have lived since 2014, having moved there from Hawai’i where we had lived for over a dozen years. We are there because WU’s invitation to Mary Pat to teach in the Math Dept. seemed like a call. Even before I left Hawai’i I had discussed with my bishop there about the various opportunities for serving the church from where were about to move to. Clearly in Rock Hill we are close to NC while still living in SC and really we are pretty close to a number of Episcopal dioceses. When I moved here I called fairly soon and found that it would be 9 months or more before I could meet with the bishop of North Carolina. I decided to put that off for a while. Of course you then proceeded to get rid of your bishop by sending him to New York. After meeting with Bp. Anne, I finally received my license to supply in North Carolina...