St George's Sermon Blog

  Luke 19:28-40; 22:14-23:56 Palm Sunday always a weird sort of day to me.   Such strong dichotomies. It begins with a celebration and ends with death.   It begins in protest and ends in sorrow.   And it is a day that shows us that crowds are powerful.   For good or ill, crowds are powerful.   This year we are living in the Gospel of Luke and I like Luke.   He is more focused on the disciples, and because he writes for a wider audience, he is better at taking in the bigger picture.   And we began our day with Jesus’s Triumphal Entry, which especially in Luke can only be described as protest march.   While the other Gospel writers remember the crowd shouting in Jewish slogans in Aramaic, Luke remembers how they shouted Roman slogans reserved for emperors, governors and generals to an unarmed man, born as a peasant and riding on a donkey.   We hear them shout "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and ...

  John 12:1-8 So our 40 day journey through Lent together is beginning to draw to a close.   This is the last regular Sunday in Lent.   Next week will mark the start of Holy Week with Palm Sunday and the Reading of the Passion.   And so today we complete out Lenten journey by reading this beautiful little story about Mary anointing Jesus’s feet.   And it is for us a fitting end to this season of discipleship and learning to listen to the Holy Spirit as we prepare for what Jesus has in store for us.   But first, lets step back for a moment for a moment and see where we are.   Not so long ago, in the story we last heard on All Saints Day, Jesus raised Mary’s brother Lazarus after he had been dead for 4 days.   We all probably know that story well.   But, there is a lesser known segue between that stories and this one that is very important.   As soon as the word gets out about Jesus raising Lazarus, Jesus gets very famous and popular a...

Sermon provided by Rev Ben Adams of All.together Campus Ministry In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Mother of us All. Amen. Well good morning dear people of St. George’s! What a pleasure it is to be back here with you today, and since it’s been a while since I last preached, I thought I’d reintroduce myself. So, my name is Ben Adams and I serve as the Pastor of All.together Campus Ministry, a Lutheran/Episcopal campus ministry in Dearborn and Detroit. We serve the students, staff, and faculty of Wayne State University, Henry Ford College, and the University of Michigan Dearborn. I can proudly say that in less than four years we have cultivated a vibrant community of faith from the seeds we have been sowing on each of our campuses.   And we are doing some exciting things. This academic year in particular is culminating this coming May with a group of fourteen traveling to Holden Village, a remote retreat center deep in the Cascade Mountains of Washington st...

Provided by Rev Susan Butterworth from Sermons that Work  Luke 13:1-9 From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine, from violence and oppression, and from dying suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord, deliver us. Amen. Today’s gospel reading opens with two rather perplexing and distressing examples of dying suddenly and unprepared. Biblical scholars tell us that nothing further is known of the Galileans murdered by Pilate nor the victims of the collapse of the tower of Siloam; details of those disasters are lost in the mists of time. We can presume, however, that these events were known to the ancient audiences of Luke’s gospel. In this central section of Luke’s narrative, Jesus is on a prophetic journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, preaching and teaching along the way. Crowds have gathered to hear him speak. Some of those present bring up the fate of some Galileans brutally murdered by Pilate while they were at prayer in the Temple in...

Luke 13:31-34; Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 We have made it to week two of Lent, and so now we are getting to the meaty part of the season.   We are well on our way, but we still have a long way to go.   This is where the rubber begins to hit the road so to speak.   10 days in, our Lenten practices are either starting to become habits or falling by the wayside.   It’s that time when we really want to start seeing results for our activities but they may not be here yet.   Our journey to the cross has really only just begun, but very often we wish the destination would come sooner, that change would come faster.   If only Easter would arrive as quickly as this the sudden change of seasons that came upon us this week, and yet we are still here waiting another month to enjoy our resurrection joy. And Jesus knows this.   This is not news.   We are not unique in trying to rush the process.   Our Gospel lesson this week reminds us of this simple fact....

  Luke 4:1-13;  Romans 10:8b-13 This is the first week in Lent as we begin our 40 day journey together with Jesus toward the cross.   Lent is an ancient and Holy time in the church.   Back in the earliest days of the church when Christianity was still a new religion, new Christians who were preparing to be baptized would undergo a special period of intensive preparation during the final 40 days before their baptism on Easter.   This period was designed to mirror other 40 day periods of preparation for an encounter with God found in the bible.   Like when Moses went up onto Mount Sinai for 40 days, and when Elijah journeyed for 40 days in the wilderness while escaping persecution and most importantly when Jesus fasted for 40 days in the wilderness and was tempted by the devil before the start of his public ministry in the Gospel story we hear today. As the church grew and became the dominant religion and as more and more people were baptized as infants o...