When Moses was summoned to the top of Mount Sinai he was given six days to prepare before God revealed himself. A cloud descended and the glory of the Lord appeared to Moses causing his face to glow with the reflected glory of God. But after communing with God, receiving his wisdom in the form […]
Sermon Topic: Christian Life
The Gift of Grace
Supposedly we have left summer behind by the first week of October, though you can hardly tell from the temperature outside. The autumn equinox was back a couple of weeks ago. Fittingly for the modern world, it was marked not so much by a change in weather as the advent of pumpkin-spice everything. Welcome to […]
Parables of the Kingdom of Heaven
There was a prominent stained glass window in the church where I grew up. It depicted heaven. It was a beautiful window to behold, all clouds and angels, loosely based on the description of the heavenly Jerusalem in the book of Revelation. The detail that has stuck with me the most is the wide streets […]
Be born in us today.
It is often said the Anglicans reveal what they believe through their liturgy and music – the old adage is Lex orandi – Lex Credendi; loosely translated as, “The law of praying is the law of believing.” Thus, the great collects of the Book for Common Prayer which Archbishop Cranmer composed in the 16th century, […]
One Day to Make a Beginning of Being Grateful
Late in the day, just before sunset, a man sat alone on the stump of a tree. He was stooped over looking at the ground between his feet. He seemed older than he was then, but everyone would agree that he was too young to die (not that anybody cared whether he did or didn’t). […]
How to Understand the Chastening of the Lord
The second of Dorothy Sayers’s great Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries bears a title adapted from the epistle to the Hebrews: Clouds of Witness. In that book, there are many suspects for a murder, but in the end it turns out there was no murder. It is my opinion that a good mystery story cannot help […]
Caesar is not Lord of our Souls
I have here in my hand a coin; it is one, thin dime, the smallest United States coin in circulation. But like all US coins it bears an inscription that reads, In God We Trust. The inclusion of this motto on our currency is attributed to an increased religious sentiment that emerged during our Civil […]
A Life about "Us"
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. “No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main.” – John Donne (1572-1631) The English poet John Donne penned these lines in 1623. Laid low by a relapsing sickness that was tearing […]
Holy People and Holy Places
One of the things that people frequently tell me they want in sermons is that they have contemporary relevance. We do not just want to hear about the events of the past, I have heard, or what so-and-so said about such and such. Make it contemporary, I hear. Make it about the present, they say. […]
The Unshakeable
Hebrews is one of the harder books of the Bible to understand, yet at the same time, thanks to its poetry and allusiveness, I find it often compellingly attractive. This evening, as we return to the 12th chapter (we did the first half of it two weeks ago), the writer (who is anonymous) launches into […]
