A sermon on Mark 9:38-50 Whoever you are and wherever you find yourselves on your journey of faith, know that you are most welcome here to receive God’s goodness, mercy, and love. Amen. I always start my sermons with this prayer, but today I am very conscious that applies to me as much as to any of you. I need God’s goodness, mercy, and love – for all kinds of reasons. Today, one of those reasons is that this is a tough text for me to preach. For one thing, I am painfully aware of how it calls me out. You see, at times in my life, I have done almost exactly what the disciples do at the beginning of today’s gospel story. The details are different – I have never tried to stop an exorcist becau
A sermon on Mark 9:30-37 Sometimes, the very first time I read through the next Sunday’s gospel lesson I will be struck by a particular realization or perspective that grabs hold of me and demands my attention as I prepare my sermon. This week that initial response was: “Jesus would have made a really bad business person.” In case that connection is not immediately obvious to you, I promise I will explain it, but not right away. First, I want to tell you about how this realization connected with my life this week. It starts with one of my dearest friends, an ordained Presbyterian minister who is in the process of interviewing for a new job. (I share this story with her permission.) She is in
A sermon on Mark 8:27-38 This week, Facebook took me to church. On Monday, after doing my initial read of today’s gospel lesson, I thought it would be interesting to pose Jesus’s question to my Facebook universe. “Who Do You Say That I Am?” Since I am not Jesus, of course, I changed the language to ask “who is Jesus to you?”, and with a few other words to frame the question, I sent it out into the social media jungle. In about two and a half days I had gathered 80 different responses. Some were simple; some more detailed. Some came from a place of skepticism about religion, while others were deeply personal. They came from atheists and fundamentalists and the spectrum in between. Some made m
The following is the script for an enacted sermon that was proclaimed in worship in the place of a traditional sermon for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost. This dramatic reenactment of the gospel story uses a strategy of interrupted narrative, wherein the gospel story is retold - using the actual words of the gospel narrative (indicated by the quotations in the script)- but within the story much more detail is inserted, including notes about the context, imagined thought processes of the characters, and interpretive reflections. This interpretive approach attempts to draw us into the story as an embodied experience that calls on our lives in the ways that all powerful stories do, because we
Sermon on Mark 7: 1-15, 21-23 This past Tuesday I got the chance to spend an evening with my Mom – just the two of us – and we decided to go see the film “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” It’s a documentary about Fred Rodgers, the Presbyterian minister whose lifelong ministry to children included his creation, production, and involvement in just about every aspect of the PBS program “Mr. Rodger’s Neighborhood.” I was excited to see the film with my mom, because my memories of Mr. Rodger’s Neighborhood are bound up with my memories of childhood. I was anticipating the warm glow of nostalgia linked to the familiar characters and scenes, the songs and the cardigan sweaters. And who better to join me
