St George's Sermon Blog

Luke 1:39-56 So I told you all last month that we had finished our Season of Women and it was all wrapped up.   But it turns out I lied.   Because I made an error, I missed something critically important and so now we have to come back and correct it.   Because we spent this whole year talking about women leaders in the Bible.   And it was great, we saw women do all these amazing things, women who lead armies, women who toppled empires, women who taught and women who preached the good news. And women who sang songs that passed on the secrets of the world.   But we missed something, we missed half the story because it only works for women to sing the songs that change the world if there is someone to listen to them.   This only works if alongside the women who lead, there are women (and men) who are willing to listen, to follow, to make space, to offer support and refuge, even when it is costly, or dangerous or hard. So today, in the midst of this beauti...

  Advent 3 (C) God’s Joy Is Justice by  The   Rev. Canon Whitney Rice [RCL] Zephaniah 3:14-20; Canticle 9; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18   Today is the third Sunday of Advent, traditionally known as Gaudete Sunday. Gaudete is the Latin word meaning “rejoice,” and the origin of this name for the third Sunday of Advent comes from the beginning of our reading from Philippians today: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” Advent is actually a penitential season like Lent, something many people don’t realize. Just like how in Lent we use the time to prepare for Easter and reflect on things like our mortality and sin, we do the same in Advent to prepare for Christmas. Thinking about how much we need Jesus helps us get ready to welcome and greet him. It makes the contrast between the penitential season and the major feast leading to a festal season all the greater, and our joy at Christmas and Easter all the brighter. That’s why we light the...

  Luke 3:1-6 We are getting to the time of year when we are entering truly into the already and not yet portion of the Advent season.   We are really in the meaty middle of this season of preparation and waiting.   And this to me is always an anxiety provoking time of year.   Christmas is surely well on the way, just a little over two weeks until the big day, but still too far out for anything to feel complete or certain.   It is a time where preparations are ramping up but also when the possible cracks begin to show.   Where you find out that that family member might have to change plans and miss the celebration or that gift you really wanted in sold out or you just aren’t feeling up to doing that one thing you usually do every year.   So how are we to prepare for the coming of our prefect savior when we start to realize that everything might not end up being so perfect after all? Luckily our readings this week are here to help us do just that. ...

  Luke 21:25-36 Today is the start of the season of Advent.  It is a time of waiting and anticipation here in the church, a time where we gather, light candles, and prepare for the coming of our Lord.  It is meant to be a time of quiet and meditation and even penitence.    Meanwhile out in the commercial world, the opposite is going on.   We are already deep into the Christmas season which starts probably in late October, ends December 25 th and where it is supposedly our patriotic American duty to spend as much money as possible and do as many things as possible in as short a time as possible not matter how busy, stressed or broke it makes you.   This season of Christmas becomes a frenzied time of shopping, decorating, visiting and cooking for the grand now almost entirely secular Holiday Season, which has little to nothing to do with the birth of our Lord or anything religious. And add in all the craziness going on in the world around us right n...

  1 Sam 1:4-28; 2:11, 18-21; 2:1-10 This is the final week of our Season of Women, the church year is coming to a close and together this year we have been on quite a journey and we have heard so many powerful tales. Tales of women who are fierce in so many ways, women who are wise, women who lead armies, women who topple empires, women who proclaim the good news, women who lead through service, women, several women who challenge God (directly or through Jesus) so thoroughly that they change the mind of God.   And now today we come full circle and we end where we began, with a mom.   We started this journey with a Mom, with Mary, the mother of God, agreeing to smuggle God into the world in her very body, with a story about a woman enduring great danger and great pain in order to say yes to God. We began with a mom singing a love song to her son about toppling the mighty and bringing justice to the poor.   And we have gone on a long and winding journey through t...

  Ruth 2:1-8; 3:1-11; 4:13-17 We are nearing the end of our season of Women and today we resume our story from last week about Ruth and Naomi and we follow along in this story about vulnerability and risk and the power of loyalty and community in the face of unsurmountable odds.   And so today is a day when we talk about biblical widowhood because widows were among the most vulnerable people in ancient society.   And as such they are mentioned often in the bible, both in narrative stories and in the biblical commands of the Torah, prophets, and Jesus’s teaching.   Because it has always been true that the measure of a communities’ faithfulness, strength and cohesion always lies in how they treat the most vulnerable among them. And so today we encounter one of the longest sustained narratives about biblical widowhood in the book of Ruth.   And I really wish we could read the whole 4 chapter book here because every word of it is great.   But alas, it is ju...

Ruth 1:1-22; John 11:32-44 Today we celebrate All Saints Day or more properly the portion of the Holiday that is more closely historically connected to All Souls Day.  It is a day where we remember the saints who have gone before us.  More specifically the Saints of our lives, the faithful departed who we have loved and lost as they entered the church triumphant.  Those who have taught us and nurtured us and helped us grow in our faith no matter how long of short their lives may have been.  And it is a day when we can think about and talk about and publicly acknowledge our grief and the pain we continue to feel over the loss of loved ones.  And honestly this is a such a gift because this opportunity seems rare in our culture and even in our church. And today we receive some help, yet again from the example of the faithful women of the bible.   Today we listen and bear witness to the grief of these holy women.  And I have added the story of Naomi f...

Judges 4:1-9,14-20; 5:2-3, 6-9, 12-13, 24-27, 31 After a couple of weeks off, the women are back in our lessons and we get some truly great ones over the next couple of weeks.  And I bet this one we read today was pretty unfamiliar.  How many of you have ever even heard this story?  Especially about Jael.  It appears absolutely nowhere in the regular lectionary.  I bet some of you were vaguely aware of Deborah.  Deborah is a pretty common name so there is probably at least some awareness that it is biblical.  Some may even know that she was a judge engaged in battle.  She at least made it into my kids’ children’s story bible.  And I am pretty sure I taught her story at VBS at some point.  But Jael’s story is almost never told.  Maybe it’s the intimate nature of her activities, or the obvious violence (though rarely a problem in Biblical stories featuring men), but her story just doesn’t make the rounds much.  It rarely gets tol...

Mark 10:17-31 So we are taking a bit of a break from our Season of Women this week.   There’s no women in our lectionary this week and a whole lot of us are going to be at Crossroads this week so we are are taking a couple of weeks off.   But don’t worry, the women will be back at the end of the month and there are some bangers coming.   But alas, I apparently didn’t plan this well because we return to Mark this week with a humdinger of a text (Maybe I should have just found a woman to talk about).   But that’s okay, we can work with this, because you know what, I like this passage.   Quite a lot actually.   And it contains a lot more good news that one might think at first glance. Our story opens with a man who approaches Jesus on the road asking for guidance.   He is a religious man and he wants to know what he must do to inherit eternal life.   And so after questioning him and discovering that he is already a devout man who knows and keeps ...