Tag: Sermon

  • First, Love

    First, Love

    How Jesus’s subversive call to love continues to challenge us a Homily for Proper 25A  |  Text: Matthew  22:34-46  Commander Love Love GOD. Love neighbor. This is the basis for all of our teaching. We can see it, too. When we read those first five books of our sacred scripture, those written in Hebrew, we…

  • Rejecting the Trap

    The dishonesty behind asking compromises any answer Jesus may have to the question a Homily for Proper 24A  |  Text: Matthew  22:15-22 The Trap This is not a story about taxes. This is a story about a trap that backfires. A trap set to deal with authority. And every time we go near the question of…

  • Closer to the Kingdom

    Closer to the Kingdom

    How the negative helps us find the positive in the Parable of the Wicked Tenants a Homily for Proper 22 A  |  Text: Matthew  21:33-46   It is a great honor to be here to join you this morning. I am so thankful for the grace and generosity that has been shown to me already. I…

  • Childproofing Church

    Order, stumbling blocks, and what real Christian community looks like a Homily for  Proper 18 A  |  Text: Matthew 18:15-20   what we mean by sin When Jesus speaks to the disciples in this passage, He speaks of sin against each other. This isn’t so much fault-finding, which we all do so easily, but sin-naming.…

  • When a rock is not a rock

    rethinking Jesus’s vision of church, Peter, and the love of GOD We mistake the naming of Peter as reflective of his character, rather than His. a Homily for Proper 16 A  |  Text: Matthew 16:13-20     desiring proof Again the Pharisees. Those ancient ideological evangelicals–obsessed with rule-following–return. This time they’ve brought back-up: the Sadducees. Not…

  • The Water and the Land

    Jesus’s response to the crowd, Pharisees, and the Canaanite Woman reveals how hard it is to be perfect and how ridiculous the pursuit really is a Homily for Proper 15 A Text: Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28   on the water, on the land Jesus is walking along while some crazy woman is shouting at Him. Shouting.…

  • Finding Abundance in Deserted Places

    Finding Abundance in Deserted Places

    Our Part in the Feeding of the Multitudes The challenge of the story as we receive it is that we think its all about Jesus and His magic hands. The Eucharistic metaphor gets us thinking that for sure. But the story isn’t about reversing scarcity, but finding abundance in deserted places. a Homily for Proper 13 A Text: Matthew 14:13-21…

  • Hiding the Kingdom

    Jesus’s parables are dependent on seeing and understanding Proper 12A  |  Matthew 13:31-33,44-52 The Hiding At the beginning of this chapter, we’re told Jesus is so swarmed by people that He jumps into a boat to teach the crowds surrounding Him on the shore. There so many people He has to put a barrier up; to…