Category: Sermons

I wonder whether Jesus knew what to expect, going up onto the mountain. I wonder whether Moses knew what to expect going up onto the mountain. It’s pretty clear that Peter and James and John had no idea what to expect. Peter, as he frequently is, is caught completely off-guard and is sort of babbling–like,…

Jesus is full of contradictions today, as he so often is. Blessed are the poor, blessed are the mourning, the hungry, the merciful, the persecuted. These are not people we usually think of as particularly blessed. And they are not the people who end up in power. They are not people who end up winning…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…