St George's Sermon Blog

  Mathew 24:36-44 Today is the start of the Advent season here at church and for many of us, this weekend also marked the start of our full swing preparations for Christmas.   Many of us spent the weekend hauling boxes of Christmas decorations up from the basement, braving Black Friday crowds to get a jump on our Christmas shopping and breaking out the Christmas music.   Even here, those old familiar carols are starting to permeate the service.   And all of this is ostensibly because someday soon, an adorable baby will be born in a manger in Nazareth.   But this is also the start of Advent and Advent isn’t really about all that.   Advent is a season not so much about preparing for Christmas as it is preparing for Jesus.   And I don’t mean the baby in a manger but the real living, crucified and resurrected Jesus who is alive and working in the lives of his followers. This is the Jesus we are called to watch for today, for he is coming and alread...

Our King [RCL] Jeremiah 23:1-6; Canticle 16; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43 Today, as we celebrate Christ the King, we witness strong-man authoritarians who aspire to be kings espousing nationalist, white-supremacist, anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-democratic policies rise up across the world and right here in the United States. In 1925, as the world was being gripped by similar nationalist, secularist, anti-Semitic, authoritarian, fascist dictators, Pope Pius XI instituted Christ the King Sunday to refocus us on why we are here – to be icons of God’s love in this world. Originally set as the last Sunday of October, Pope Paul VI moved it to the Last Sunday before Advent and called it, “The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.”      Christ the King is a title that strikes a peculiar tension since any and all descriptions of Jesus thankfully bear little or no resemblance to the kinds of earthly leaders and kings Jeremiah condemns in n...

  Luke 21:5-19, 2 Thess 3:6-13 This is the last Sunday of Ordinary time.   The very last Green Sunday of the year, we are drawing to a close our time of walking alongside Luke through his challenging world-changing teaching.   And so Luke, of course has to finish with a bang.   He is not letting us go easy is he?   Instead he goes out with one last big teaching for us about what it really means to follow Jesus in difficult times.   And once again it feels oddly timely even if it is also really ominous. Because today Luke tells us a story about how the world is coming to an end.   But not really.   In our gospel from Luke today, Jesus flips the traditional apocalyptic discourse on its head and talks about how the world is not actually coming to an end.   No matter how much it might feel like it to his followers.   It starts with the disciples feeling good about themselves, admiring the beauty of the temple that the Jewish people, m...

Luke 20:27-38 We are almost done with the Gospel of Luke, just a couple more weeks until the end of the liturgical year, but Luke, he is not yet done with us. Luke is still trying to get us to think in new ways and reorient our worldview in order to focus on what God thinks is truly important. And our gospel reading for today skips a little ways ahead from where we have been.   It comes from right near the end of Jesus’s ministry after he has entered Jerusalem for the final time.   All of Jesus’s counter cultural teaching, all of Jesus’s revolutionary ideas, all of Jesus’s pushing against the world order is finally beginning to come to a head.   Those with the most to lose are really starting to push back.   And so today’s lesson comes right in the middle of a string of encounters with people and groups questioning Jesus in the temple.   Now lets be clear, these are not his friends or disciples, but rather people who are trying to either discredit him or get...