Faith in Progress

February 5, 2017 Matthew 5:13-20 I wish that our Gospel reading today was about Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.  Because instead of having 5 husbands, I have 5 sermons, and my present sermon is not really my sermon.   But instead today we get Jesus talking about salt and light.  And in the end, maybe that’s just what I needed to hear.  Maybe it’s just what we all need to hear right now.  It just might take some time working on it to get to the point where we can begin to figure out what to do with it. “You are the salt of the earth.  You are the light of the world,” Jesus tells the crowds gathered before him.  Or, from another translation, “Let me tell you why you are here.  You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth….  You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world.” The light part sounds familiar, we’re used to hearing, singing, praying about light.  ...

January 22, 2017 Matthew 4:12-23  We are now several weeks into the filler season.  It doesn’t even have its own name; we just call it The Season After Epiphany.  The miraculous stories of Christmas are over and we have ages before anything exciting happens.  There’s a whole month and a half until Lent when we start getting ready to come close to the mystery of Easter.  So here we sit in this in-between time, which the Church used to call Ordinary Time.   Which certainly doesn’t sound very exciting, but at least it’s honest.   But we’re in luck, because today we are being invited to escape this ordinary time and head out on an adventure!  Today we see disciples-to-be Peter, Andrew, James and John doing what they did before Jesus - casting and mending their fishing nets.  The waves are lapping at the shore, the stench of yesterday’s catch still lingers.  They are in the midst of their ordinary world, with their ordinary r...

Epiphany January 8, 2017 This always feels like a strange time of year, this season after Christmas. It’s only been two weeks, but it feels like forever since we gathered in here on Christmas Eve, candles lighting up our faces as we sang Silent Night.  You could almost feel the angel chorus joining us. But now the world around us feels grayer.  All the planning and wrapping and cooking and gifting is done.  The pageant costumes are folded carefully in their plastic tubs.  Christmas trees line the streets in lumps.  The decorations have mostly returned to basements and attics.  If you’re like me, your New Years resolutions have already been broken more times than kept.  We’re back to work and commuting and homework and school-lunch making.  It’s a different kind of busy-ness. We’re back to regular time.  The time when it’s harder to feel God with us.  It’s harder to believe that the mystery of back then is still a par...

December 25, 2016 John 1:1-14 This year I’ve been doing a preaching fellowship at the seminary.  We have monthly small peer group meetings and a couple residencies scattered throughout the year where we all gather together.  Our main leader/teacher/mentor is the preaching professor at Virginia Theological Seminary, Ruthanna Hooke.  Her background is in theatre, so one of her main pushes is always to have us find ways to expand our preaching so it isn’t just about theology and research and careful wording but also about our whole selves, including our bodies.  And so all kinds of interesting and surprising things are part of our time together.  Yoga, improv, good snacks.  And lots of body and voice techniques.   She has us take deep breaths and sigh out noisily, sometimes while letting our heads fall forward.  Or she'll have us stretch out as far as we can and then relax different sections of our bodies.  Or we'll hum from d...

November 13, 2016 Isaiah 65:17-25 If you feel like you’re teetering on the edge of an abyss right now, if you’re having trouble seeing anything but darkness — Take heart.  We’ve been here before.  In the beginning, in the very beginning, before God created the heavens and the earth, there was chaos.  One of my favorite renderings of the creation story puts it this way, “Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness.”  And over the chaos of this watery abyss, God’s Spirit brooded. In the beginning, everything was tumult and messiness and darkness, and God sat right there over it for a while, just brooding.  But then God breathed.  And God began to imagine.  And God began to bring life out of the chaos.  And even before creation was finished, even while the life and light were just beginning to show through, God was able to see and pronounce the goodness that was there: “It is good,” God promised.  Eve...

October 23, 2016 Luke 18:9-14   I‘m guessing we can probably all agree that this election seems to have brought our country to a time of crisis, though we might disagree about what makes it that way.   For me, it is almost unimaginable that a candidate for president of the United States excuses boasting about sexual assault with “locker room talk.”   But that’s really just the straw that broke the camel’s back.   We have become so polarized, and not just on the usual political issues, but on gender and race and religion and ethnicity.   It has been hard to watch us fall apart.     Given all that’s brewing in the world, at our monthly local Episcopal clergy lunch, someone asked how we were talking about this election in our congregations.  Several clergy spoke about how carefully they were balancing their words to speak about civility and love so as to reach but not offend Trump supporters in their congregations.  I was surprised....