St George's Sermon Blog

Luke 14:1, 7-14 Here we go again, we heard more from the Gospel of Luke today and guess what he is taking about, power, privilege, class and hospitality.   Why are we not surprised.   This time also unsurprisingly it is in the context of food.   Which is one of the things I like most about the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is always eating.   He spends far more time eating, feeding others and talking about food in the Gospel of Luke than in the other gospels.   Thus, Luke captures a special place in my heart as I absolutely love food, cooking and anything to do with feeding people.   But here is the thing, in the ancient world, much more than today, talk about food was in fact still always talk about money, class and power. Because food was and in certain ways still is the very center of our social world.   Perhaps today in the world of drive-thrus, and tv diners and where most of us gathered here have never had to think very hard about where our next meal...

Of All the Issues…, Proper 16 (C) 2007 August 26, 2007 Amy Richter   Of all the issues facing the church 120 years ago, one that was considered so pressing that it was addressed by bishops throughout the Anglican Communion at the Lambeth Conference of 1888 was this: the observance of the Sabbath. The bishops at that conference issued a report including these statements: The principle of the religious observation of one day in seven is of Divine and primeval obligation, and was afterwards embodied in the Fourth Commandment. The observance of the Lord's Day as a day of rest, of worship, and of religious teaching has been a priceless blessing in all Christian lands in which it has been maintained. The growing license in its observance threatens a grave change in its sacred and beneficent character. … The increasing practice on the part of some of the wealthy and leisurely classes of making the day a day of secular amusement is most strongly to be deprecated. The most careful regard sh...

  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 ...