St George's Sermon Blog

Matthew 5:1-12 Today is All Saints Day.   A wonderful festival and one of my favorite holidays in the church year.   It is a day of great Hope.   Hope for the future, hope for the past, hope for those we love in all times and places.   It is a day that connects us deeply to our baptismal promises and to the hope we have as children of God and to the whole communion of saints, all baptized Christians of every time and place. We have spent some time this fall remembering a number of big Saints specifically St Francis and St Luke as we looked to their lives as examples of faithful living.   Today, we continue in that theme but today we get to commemorate all of the Saints and so especially we get to remember what I like to call the small saints.   Non-canonized saints, the saints of our lives, the blessed and holy ordinary people who have shaped our lives and taught us the ways of faith.   Parents and Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles, spouses, children,...

  2 Timothy 4:5-13; Luke 4:14-21 Today we are celebrating the Feast of St Luke, the Patron saint of physicians, surgeons, artists, painters, butchers, bachelors, and notaries.   And I am excited this fell on a Sunday this year (although I found out this week we aren’t really supposed to be celebrating it) because One, as you know I am desperately trying to avoiding listening to people needlessly fighting with Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew.   Two, Luke is my personal favorite Gospel writer and in general I just really like him.   And three, Luke’s prominent themes of boundary crossing, radical welcome, service and social justice fit perfectly with our themes for this season. So, St Luke the Evangelist who we celebrate today is one of the church’s earliest saints.   He is most remembered as the author of both the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, and he is probably the only biblical author in the whole Bible who was likely not Jewish.   Instead, as be...

Matt 22:1-14 We are marching on into October and thus continues my quest to avoid the dealing with the readings from the Gospel of Matthew for this season.   But alas, there is no major saint’s day this week so I got stuck reading from Matthew.   And the reading for today could be good, in fact in Luke, it is good.   Because both Matthew and Luke remember this story.   And Luke’s version is this perfectly normal little parable about a man who invites his friends to a banquet and his friends are too busy to come so he invites all these other people and they come and they all have a good old time.   I like Luke’s story, in fact it would have fit perfectly with our stewardship themes about how generosity can create places of welcome.   I like it so much that I really, really thought about swapping Luke’s story in for Matthew’s today and hoping that no one noticed.   It was very tempting.   But alas, I couldn’t do it.   Because Matthew’s albeit...

  Acts: 4: 32-35, 5:1-11; Luke 12: 13-21 Today is the Feast of St Francis, and it is particularly great that October 4 falls on a Sunday this year because this is also a jubilee year for St Francis marking 800 years since his death and inviting us to remember his enduring legacy and impact on the church.   The Feast of St Francis traditionally is a day across the church and especially in the Episcopal church where we often celebrate St Francis’ deep love of animals and nature with Pet Blessings and outdoor worship and all manner of animal and creation themed activities.   Which is good.   But we did all that last month when the bishop was here.   And now at least for me, I am just really thankful after this crazy month that we are back inside our clean, warm and newly unsmelly sanctuary.   And so instead, I think that this year we have a really wonderful opportunity to think more deeply about St Francis and the wider legacy of his life and what it can t...

Matt 21:23:32; Philippians 2:1-13 It’s fighting season in the lectionary.   Today in the Gospel of Matthew we see the religious authorities go and pick a fight with Jesus.   And this fight that they start with Jesus today goes on in our readings for the next 7 weeks.   These people, they just keep arguing, they keep attacking Jesus, one group after another, for like the next month and a half. And I just can’t.   I can’t do it.   Not this year.   I have preached through this series of readings before, and it does have a lot to teach us.   It’s good, see me in 3 years, we’ll talk about it, we’ll do it all.   But not this year.   Not when every time I turn on the TV, I see some of the most ridiculous political ads I have ever seen in my life (are we really fighting over which candidate likes football more?).   Not when we seem to have forgotten even the most basic rules of civil discourse.   Not when our church recently literally c...

Jonah 3:11-4:10; Matt 20:1-16 So today we have a set of stories from the bible that really get us thinking about the principle of scarcity and how it affects us.   Our Gospel lesson for today tells one of the more infuriating stories in the whole bible about a landowner who goes out and hires people to work for the harvest in his vineyard.   And he goes out time and time again to hire more and more workers throughout the day.   Some end up working a full 12-hour day and others for only a hour.   And then at the end of the day, when it’s time to get paid, the owner very publicly, very intentionally pays all the workers the same standard daily wage no matter how long or hard they have worked. And I am betting this story probably annoys you a little bit.   It’s okay, it does me too.   It violates our basic common sense of fairness.   What the owner does just doesn’t seem right.   Some people worked so hard and the others that came late barely wor...