Sermons

When Jesus first meets Nathanael in John’s gospel, he promises him something extraordinary: “You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” Angels are all over our scriptures. From Genesis to Revelation, from Jacob’s dream to Gabriel’s annunciation, from the songs of the heavenly host to the battles of Michael and the dragon. They are in our liturgy every single Sunday—“therefore with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven.” They’re in our hymns, our prayers, and on the tympanum above our door. And yet, it seems that many…

A little while back I was watching some television show, and for some random plot reason or another one of the characters ended up in a monastery which was under a vow of silence. She was assigned to clean a wine vat with another resident, and there was a rather comical scene, because the vat was big enough that they were both inside it to clean it, but with a rounded “floor” to stand on, they kept falling and giggling, and the one who lived there showed our character how to strap rags to her feet which helped keep traction…

Today, I feel called by the scripture to talk about anxiety. I think about anxiety a lot, to be frank—I’m a very anxious person, by nature. And the most fabulous—and resonant—definition of anxiety I’ve ever heard is that anxiety is using your imagination to be mean to you. Whoof. And yet… well… yes! Thing is, […]

The scene we just heard from Luke’s gospel is a familiar one to anyone who regularly prays the Angelus. For a time, I prayed it twice a day, six days a week while a brother with the SSJE. The community’s tower bell rings the Angelus daily at noon, three hundred and sixty three days a year, silenced only to mark the solemnity of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. I confess that in preparing this homily, I struggled with this text’s familiarity. Centuries of representation have layered upon the narrative the assumptions and preoccupations of so many ages. These layers of…

Easter has always captivated my imagination—even in my days as an angry atheist, convinced that such miraculous events are of course impossible. Yet, in this season of my life, marked as it is by bereavement, scarred by the awful and unanticipated absence of my late parents, Easter—with all its accompanying hope and joy—has been less a consolation and more a taunting insult, a vexation, a catalyst for all kinds of cynicism, doubt, and anger. Of late, I have refused to be comforted, closing off the precincts of my heart to any touch of joy or hope. I have refused to…

This evening’s lections highlight for us a very important dual reality about what we might call “the Religious world-view.” The passages from Zechariah and Psalm 87 remind us that the beauty and goodness of religion have real power to bring people into a relationship with the Divine. Here a context is disclosed where the abundance of God’s love become so incarnated by the life and worship of God’s people that all people will long for nothing more than to enter into that life.