St George's Sermon Blog

  Luke 12:32-40 At least we are back inside this week, but I am sure it is any better in here and we are hot and we are tired, and then we get to hear yet another text from Luke about money.   Which actually should be pretty unsurprising because Luke loves to talk about money almost more than anything else, except perhaps maybe hospitality and food.   In fact, half of all the parables in Luke are about money, wealth and our resources.   Half.   Let that sink in for a moment.   Jesus talks about money 10 times as often as he talks about sex.   And much more often even than he talks about worship or the bible or even prayer.   Now the fact that Jesus actually talks about money this much may really surprise you.   It certainly surprised me the first time I heard it.   Maybe it’s because the church it seems very often likes to take exactly the opposite approach.   We talk a whole lot about how to worship and pray, we deliberate deep...

Luke 12:13-21 I really am trying to make this summer hard on myself apparently.   This again is not the lectionary trio I would have picked for today if given the choice.   We’re outside, we’re welcoming our pet friends, we have a band, it’s a joyful day.   And to make it harder, we only hear half of the Gospel story and so you have to come back next week to hear the rest.   Yet here we are with a trio of texts that are less than joyful and quite frankly a bit depressing because they are unmistakably about facing our own mortality and the legacy we leave behind, voluntarily or not. For all three texts in series make a point of reminding us that one day, we are all going to die, and well as the old adage says, “You can’t take it with you.”   So the question becomes, What do you want your legacy to be?   First, out of the great wisdom tradition in Ecclesiastes we have the lament from a great king who at the end of a long and successful reign looks around ...

  Luke 11:1-13 Lord, Teach Us How to Pray, Proper 12 (C)  by  Katerina Katsarka Whitley Lord, teach us how to pray. “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily  bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive  everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time  of trial.” This is the Lord’s Prayer as found in the gospel of Luke. Prayer. What can one find to say about prayer in an environment where it can be used as a cover for hypocrisy, an easy mantra to fool the vulnerable?  “Our thoughts and prayers are with you,” politicians say to bereaved parents whose children were gunned down because these same politicians failed to do what is just and good. Even the ancients understood that empty prayers meant nothing. There was a saying in ancient Greece: “Together with Athena, move your own hands also.” Do something, don’t just pray! The disciples had witnessed that whenever their teacher, the one they called ...

Luke 10:38-42 So, I bet that at least a few of you here had a very visceral reaction when I started reading this text this morning.   I can almost feel the fists clenching, and the eyes narrowing, the bracing for what is to come.   I had a lady Ms Vikki, in my last congregation who was the perennial altar guild chair and powerpoint runner and general doer of all things, she was kind of our Deb, and she used to threaten to skip church on this Sunday (though she never actually did because she needed to be there to run the slide show) because she hated hearing pastors preach on this text.   And I bet that many of you faithful stalwart folks especially the women gathered here today have heard at least one really bad sermon on this text. The one that probably without meaning to manages to completely devalue your work in the church.   The one that accidentally implies that the largely unnoticed, unsung work of the congregation is somehow less important than the suppose...

  Luke 10:25-37 So now we are getting into the meaty part of this green season of the church year where we learn to follow Jesus and discover how to be his disciples.   All summer, we have been hearing stories about Jesus crossing over and breaking boundaries and reaching out to the least expected people imaginable.   He has taught and healed and cast out demons and then he even called out and sent his followers to join in his boundary breaking ministry. And now this week, we reach the capstone of this series of readings with our gospel story for today.   The Story of the Good Samaritan.   Which has to easily be one of the most popular stories in the whole Bible.   We love this story.   And we tell it so often that it’s easy to scarcely give it a second thought.   It’s just a simple object lesson about how we should be kind to strangers and help people in need right?   To us today it couldn’t really be more straightforward.   Clearly...

  Peace [RCL] 2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 30; Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20  by  The Rev. Joslyn Ogden Schaefer   What do you think of when you hear the word “peace”? Many people first associate the word with internal positive emotional states like calmness, contentment, and acceptance. Others jump straight to external realities like harmony among groups of people, or the absence of it among nations. It’s a big and slippery concept – something most humans desire but few seem to experience consistently. Our faith tradition has a lot to say about peace. Shalom is the word in Hebrew, and it connotes well-being in every dimension of our lives. In the New Testament, the Greek word is eiréné . In today’s readings, both Jesus and Paul talk about peace. Instead of giving us suggestions for how to cultivate inner peace or tips for self-improvement, we hear that peace isn’t generated through our own efforts. Instead, God provides this spiritual gift to us. It is ...

Luke 8:26-39 So today we are having our Ministry Celebration.   A day where we celebrate our shared ministry together.   The ministry of all believers.   And especially the often overlooked and unseen ministry of folks who quietly toil away at activities inside and outside the church, that make a huge difference in the life of the church and the world but often goes unnoticed.     We wanted to take time recognize all the ways that the people of St George’s work together to make this place what it is.   And this day has been in the works for months.   We worked out the whole summer schedule, we picked a date, we planned and announced things, we got things set up.   And then a couple of weeks ago I went and actually looked at the texts for today, and they are a mess.   This is really not anything near the bible texts I would have picked in order to talk about the church’s shared mission.   So much so I seriously thought about trying ...

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 Today is the Festival of the Holy Trinity.   The only week in the entire church year devoted to a doctrine of the church.   It is a festival devoted to entirely to an idea.   Unlike most of the commemorations of the church year which focus on specific events in the life of Christ or biblical events in the history of the church, Holy Trinity Sunday focus on the doctrine of the Trinity, the concept of God as Three persons, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit united together as a single undivided God.   But the Trinity is complex, confusing and always shrouded in mystery.     We struggle to find language to even describe much less understand the nature of the Trinity.   Countless books and seminary classes and sermons and lectures have been devoted to the topic, yet many of us still struggle to understand how God can be three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and yet still one God.   And I was bad at my Systematic Theol...

  John 14:8-17 Today is the great festival of Pentecost in the church.   One of a handful of major festivals that shape the whole of the church year.   It is the birthday of the church, the festival of the Holy Spirit.   But it is also one the grates a bit against Episcopalian sensibilities.   Because quite frankly Pentecost can be a little intimidating.   I mean just look at the story, rushing wind, tongues of fire, people suddenly and impulsively speaking in foreign languages, generally making a public spectacle of themselves.   Maybe that is why this is a holiday where we tend to keep our celebrations smaller.   Anyone can handle Christmas and Easter.   They deal with discrete historical events, events that perhaps most importantly happened to someone else.   We can easily sit by and stand as silent witnesses to the events of Jesus’s birth, life and death, but not Pentecost.   In a world full of spectator events, Pentecost is a...