St George's Sermon Blog

Mark 5:21-43      The women are back today.  Today we get the next installment of our year-long series about women in the Bible and early church.  And we get to see yet another powerful story about a biblical woman who is brave, pushes boundaries and leads and who Jesus praises unconditionally for these qualities.  She is a woman who can serve as a model for us all  And also, quite typically, the Bible doesn’t even give her the courtesy of recording her name.      But our story for today doesn’t actually begin with our heroic woman, because in our gospel reading we actually hear a pair of stories about how Jesus brings healing, restoration and hope to the people he encounters. So instead our story begins with a man, who incidentally does get his name recorded, named Jairus, the leader of the local synagogue.  As soon as Jesus arrives onshore, in a display most out of character for a man of his rank and station, Jairus throws him...

Suffering [RCL] Job 38:1-11; Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41   Note: During the 2024 Season after Pentecost, Sermons That Work will use Track 2 readings for sermons and Bible studies. Please consult our archives for many additional Track 1 resources from prior years.   People suffer. Indeed, it very much seems that good and innocent and righteous people suffer, sometimes horribly. What’s more, and maybe worse—the guilty succeed, and the evil prosper, sometimes wonderfully. These simple facts of life have been a serious challenge to every single religious tradition in human history. And every single religious tradition in human history has had something to say about human suffering, about what it means, and where it comes from, and how we can best deal with it.   We want to know why, and we want reasons, and we want it all to make sense. Philosophers, theologians, saints, mystics, and all sorts of others have all had a go at this, and they ...

  Pentecost 4 Proper 7 (B) Master of the Winds and the Waves RCL: 1 Samuel 17: (1a, 4-11, 19-23), 32-49 and Psalm 9:9-20 or 1 Samuel 17:57-18:5, 10-16 and Psalm 133; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41 The winds and the waves Shall obey my will, peace be still. Whether the wrath of the storm-tossed sea Or demons, or men, or whatever it be. No water can swallow the ship where lies The Master of ocean and earth and skies; They shall sweetly obey my will, Peace be still, peace be still. They all shall sweetly obey my will; Peace, peace be still.  James Cleveland, Peace Be Still For most, the sea conjures up delightful images. Some enjoy the serenity of a quiet walk on the shore or a cruise to a tropical island. Modern images of the sea are typically tame and inviting, lulling us into associating the sea with a sense of tranquility. The sea can be described in an endless number of ways. It is refreshing, beautiful, and humbling.  Not so for Mark. Mark’s sea is not a place for...

  Mark 4:26-34      I just love it when the lectionary just works out for me.   I really couldn’t have picked a better Gospel lesson for this particular Sunday.   It’s Father’s Day and it’s New Member Sunday and here we have such a great lesson for both these things, because today is a day about growing things.        Now I absolutely love it when this day that so wonderfully celebrates growing things falls on Father’s Day because these texts always make me think of my own Dad.   For he was a man who truly and deeply loved growing things.   As a former farmer now living in the city, he channeled all his farm energy into an incredible garden which he took very seriously.    It was amazing how much production he could wrest from the space he had carved out in the back of our yard.   And it was from him that I inherited my great love and fascination with plants, although unfortunately not so much his green thu...

  Mark 3:20-35 So as we encounter our gospel reading for today, Jesus is in trouble again.   Because as we are learning, sometimes being your authentic self is hard.   Last week, we watched Jesus heal and feed people on the sabbath.   We learned about how he is bound by the law of God to give life, to care for all people as the fulfillment of Torah.   And his ministry really takes off after this.   Our lectionary skips over like 14 verses, between this week and last week, and in this section Jesus is on fire.   He goes out, and people come from all over, like all over the world to see him, and he heals these huge crowds.   And he keeps casting out all these demons, and the demons know exactly who he is, they keep calling him Son of God before he silences them and casts them out.        And Jesus becomes so popular that there are just too many people, the need is too great, and Jesus always has to bring life.   So he gets...

  Mark 2:23-3:6      Welcome to Ordinary time, the long green season between Pentecost and the start of Advent.   Now when we say Ordinary Time, we don’t mean boring or uninteresting, though I guess it may start to seem that way about 20 weeks in, but Ordinary in the older sense, like ordinal as in numbered or counted because we number these Sundays 1 through 26 and count them off one right after the other until the end of November.   But what we do during this time anything but ordinary.   This is the time of year where we sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to what he has to say.   For you see the church year is divided into two roughly equal parts, one Advent through Pentecost, that focuses on the life of Jesus, the events of his birth, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension and one Ordinary time, that focuses on his teaching.   We are now entering the teaching half.   Where we will listen closely to the teachings of Jesus in M...