Sermons

My friends, there was no parable! Our reading this morning from the gospel is a rich and complicated story, one I have heard many times before. But the detail that jumps off the page at me is that there is no parable. I went back and read through all of chapter 15 in Matthew to […]

Some number of years ago now, Matt and I were traveling through the UK. We had been up in Edinburgh for a few days, and now we were arriving in Cambridge, having spent the better part of a day navigating the country by rail. Arriving at the train station, we began picking our way through

As we start Pride month this year, I find myself reflecting on the changing landscape for LGBTQ people around the world, and especially for our trans sisters and brothers. After what seemed like so much progress, we seem now to be in a time of regression and erosion. And though it is unfolding in countries

Who was healed? It is the question I find myself coming back to over and over as I read our story from the Acts of the Apostles this morning. Admittedly, at first this sounds like a somewhat stupid question, one easily answered with another question, “Who was raised from the dead?” But the longer one

We often think of Jesus’ beatitudes with a warm and glowing feeling, but when you really sit with them, they are troubling. They make us uncomfortable. They can even be hard to wrap our imaginations around. After all, we like the idea of being comforted and fed, especially when we are hungry and weeping, but

As I reflect on my life, I realize that my own understanding of who Jesus is has changed many times. When I was a child, he was the subject of many stories that I was told in Sunday school and in church. I believed that he was God because that’s what people, that’s what adults,

Jeff and John were an older couple when I knew them. They had married a few years before, when same-sex marriage had been legalized, but they had been together for many decades. They were faithful members of the congregation, rarely missing a Sunday and their gregarious and extroverted personalities meant that they could always be

I have a fragment of a memory from when I was a young child. I don’t know how old I was, but I was not yet tall enough to see over the top of the counters in our kitchen. My mother was in the kitchen, cooking, and I was reaching my hands up over the

But the thing David had done was evil in the Lord’s sight. Just two weeks ago, I was preaching about the promise and blessing that God sees us—all of us, all our brokenness and woundedness, and seeing us completely, God has compassion for us. And there is a wonderful good news to that reality—that we

God had warned them. The people longed for a king. They desired to be like the other nations, with a ruler that would fight their battles for them, with a figurehead that would represent their aspirations and glory. Then they would be respected. Then they would fit in on the world stage. But God was