Sermons

title: Sermon for Christmas morning subtitle: The Rev. Dale C. Hathaway author: St. Alfred's, Palm Harbor date: December 25, 2023 Change. Christmas and our relationship to it. When I was a child I thought like a child. I had dreams like a child. I related to Christmas like a child. When I became an adult I generally related to Christmas like I did when I was a child. I began to have children, and we wanted them to experience Christmas as we had known it. And then especially after I was ordained and had children at home on Christmas morning – children who were especially eager to get gifts unwrapped and surprises unsurprised, we had a rule that before Christmas morning Eucharist everyone could open just one gift – but their daddy had to celebrate the Eucharist so we at a light breakfast and off I went. Now I'm an old man. Christmas feel different. I see the festivities as if looking on from a distance, and I wonder what happened to Christmas? And what is Christmas? The Chr...

Setting Who makes saints Someone asked me the other day who makes Saints? They had observed that some of the people in the church's calendar had "saint" in front of their name and some didn't. How do you get to be a saint? I'm a little surprised at myself that my first instinct was to describe the different ways the Catholic Church and the Episcopal church make a saint. I gave a bureaucratic answer to what I think was a personal question. Somehow All Saints Day is a very personal day. There was one thing (Bishop) Scharf said two weeks ago that -- in the language of my youth --"blew me away." He pointed to how the Pharisees were asking one question and Jesus answered a different question. It's so important to listen for the right questions, isn't it. It wasn't just that it was an insight in how to understand that particular exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees. It seemed to be a kind of commentary on the importance of really listening...

Proper 18a   St. Alfred's Church    The Rev. Dale C. Hathaway   Sept. 9, 2023 Metaphor for Church I remember a snippet from a sermon many years ago. I think it was probably in my teens. The preacher made reference to the way in which looking up at the roof of the church it looked like the ribbing of a ship. He said it's not by accident that that part of the church is called a nave . The nave of a church, from the Latin navis meaning "ship." We get our word navy . Now of course Saint Alfred's doesn't have the appearance of a great sailing vessel of yesteryear, with planks and ribbing. You look up at our ceiling and it looks more like a bobbing teacup or some thing. In fact I guess looking up at the architecture in our church building it looks something like the basket that Moses was floating in down the Nile River. We heard that from the first chapter of Exodus two weeks ago. Still, all in all, there you have it. The church is as if it was sailing on a jou...

  Opening Have you ever looked back at some event in your life and realized that God's hand had been with you all along? At the time you were certain that things were going bad, and you felt all alone and had no idea how to go forward? Have you ever spent days or weeks or months or even years asking God to deliver you from something, only to discover that what had once looked like oppression was in fact the instrument of God's deliverance? Have you ever been hit over the head by what's going on in your life and wondered what could God possibly make of all this? Then just asking the question, you understood what God was doing in your life? Questions like that swirled around me in 2008. The previous year my family had hosted a young student for half a year of school so that she could attend Kamehameha school in Honolulu. It is one of the premier K-12 schools in Hawaii and is reserved for descendants of indigenous Hawaiians. It didn't work out well with other members of m...

St. Paul's, Monroe, NC  In 2021 and 2022 I was an interim at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Monroe, NC. For that ministry I wrote some regular essays intended to be general formation pieces for the congregation. These can be found at: General Religion - Church essays Some earlier writings Here are a few miscellaneous pieces, including a couple of personal items. I'm at an age now where I am not looking to keep very many things private; so if any are interested, you're welcome to read. Earlier writings and sermons

  Proper 10 July 15/16, 2023 St. Alfred's Episcopal Church Teaching Revised Common Lectionary I offer you today a sermon on ears . Or rather using our ears to listen , to really hear . It may be that I am hypersensitive to having ears to hear. When I got my hearing aids in 2011, and I could hear the birds singing in the morning, my life shifted, it changed. It is a common criticism one hears ( particularly from various Protestant denominations ) that Episcopalians don't really take scripture seriously. As an illustration to argue against that perception, I put before you today's readings from the Bible . Since June 11th we've been hearing from the book of Genesis. In particular we have been hearing from the story of Abraham. Each week we have heard a small part of a much larger story. For a psalm today, we have heard one small part of a much larger psalm -- in fact the longest psalm among the 150 we have in the Bible. It focuses on praise and exaltation of the Torah...

  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...