I am honored to preach on this Sunday dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. I was born and raised in Korea and came to the United States in my thirties. All my education and early work experience were in Korea, a country that takes pride in its ethnic homogeneity. While Korea has […]
Sermon Topic: Saint John the Baptist
The Baptism of Our Lord
Picture the Jordan River, its waters moving sluggish under a sun that burned the skin and split the stones. Around you, a crowd of dust-worn faces, their eyes hollow with the weight of what they’d seen. There in the shallows stood a man, cloaked in camel’s hair, the sandstorms of the desert etched into his […]
Magnificat Fire
Mary was a girl, young and small, from a village that could be swallowed by the dust and never missed. Nazareth. The name carried no weight then, just a whisper of a place where time had settled like silt in the cracks of the world. Yet she sang a song that bent the arc of […]
God visits us in his socks.
In today’s passage from that the closing passage of that same Epistle, Paul urges the Church at Philippi to rejoice. That word ‘rejoice’ gives us the name for this third Sunday in Advent – Gaudete Sunday – characterized by rose pink vestments and altar hangings – “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, […]
The Way of Being Undone
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. It’s hard to imagine just how completely and devastatingly disappointed Was that group that came to question the Baptizer in our Gospel reading this morning. Disappointed and, likely, quite frustrated. That John was the Messiah was clearly a live […]
'O Lamb of God, I Come, I Come'
Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
The Baptism of Our Lord
Prepare the Way of the Lord
Pause a while, pause a while In the humdrum of the city and behind a cloister wall In the early morning and when shadows start to fall See creation bending to the maker of it all And all we have to do is pause a while. (Gary Ault.1969.) I wonder what brings you here this […]
The Voice of a Prophet
In our multimedia messaging world, it is not every day that something special comes in the post, or rather in the mail, a Save the Date or invitation to something quite unexpected like a palace, a castle, a party or a special event to something that might only exist in dreams, or magic kingdoms on […]
Where Prayers Are Answered
When today’s reading from the gospel of Luke begins, the angel Gabriel had made Zacharias unable to speak. The reasonable conclusion we can draw from that is that it takes a miracle to get a priest to stop talking. Zacharias was an elderly priest of the Temple in Jerusalem. He was the husband of Elizabeth, […]
