St George's Sermon Blog

  My Lord and My God, Easter 2 (C) – 2016 April 03, 2016 Anthony F.M. Clavier Doubt is a complicated matter. It can indicate a critical mind, one that asks questions, and never takes things at face value. The opposite is a gullible mind: one that is the delight of unscrupulous sales persons, dangerous politicians, and many televangelists. There’s another type of doubt, one driven by deep emotion, an emotion stimulated by loss. It’s a form of despair, a despair that clings to loss and refuses to believe that there is any future other than one described by that which is lost. Life will never be the same again. Friends assure us that we will get over our loss of a job, an ambition, our loss of a relationship or the death of a dear one but we don’t want to hear it. We can’t believe it. Saint Thomas’s doubt is of this second type. Instead of becoming the patron saint of those who never take things at face value, Thomas might well be the hero of people who are never on time. For some rea...

Luke 24:1-12 Alleluia Christ is Risen, The Lord is Risen Indeed Alleluia! It is Easter morning.   Christ has risen we have made it through the darkness.   Today we begin a new day, but it may not be exactly what we expected.    And of course, because it is Easter the women are back.   I love that about Easter, because the Easter story is always about women.   Every story, every account, even Paul and the early church Fathers acknowledge it, everyone knows women saw first, women knew first, women told the story first, women were the first evangelists. And so, our women come, a big group of them.   And they are ready, because these are the same women who ended our Passion story last Sunday.   They are the ones who stood at the foot of the cross, the ones who stayed to watch as Jesus’s body was taken down.   Our story tells us right before this: “ The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body...

  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...