Sermons

This article is a sermon on the Binding of Isaac, at St. Matthew’s Evening Service on October 14.  Listen to the whole thing here. Featured image is Sacrifice of Isaac, by Adi Holzer, 1997 from Wikimedia.

When I preach, I usually sit with a text and ask myself the question: What is the good news that makes a claim on us in this story? What good news is God offering us in response to all the mess and bad news that we carry today?

Our church is exploring the stories of the Old Testament in a narrative arc, from Genesis 1 to Daniel, to dig deeper into this ancient relationship between God and Humanity. One can’t go back into our history without looking at Abraham: the forefather of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–and in all these faiths, no one can escape the moment when God asks Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. It’s central to our stories about our origins, the culmination of  decades  of wandering around, waiting for a promised child–which was why I sat, struggling on a Thursday night, asking myself: “What is the Good News here?”

But each time I tried to answer the question, I was met with another question that shoved it out of the way, and that was:

Do we really follow a God who asks for child sacrifice?

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As Florence floods the Carolinas, after Harvey sank Houston, and after Katrina exposed not only our ignorance and denial, but of our communal capacity to leave each other behind—after all these things, Noah’s story is taking on a new kind of significance.

This sermon was delivered at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church on Sunday, June 17. Audio will be available in the following week at stmatthewsmn.org. You can read the lessons here. When I was in second grade, our family moved from a tiny student apartment to a little house in Nashville, Tennessee. The house Read more…

This sermon was delivered at the St. Matthew’s Evening Service on 4/29. The readings we used were the lectionary appointed epistle (1 John 4:7-21) and gospel (the Gospel of John 15:1-8). You can read them here.

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This is the text of a sermon preached at Hamline Church on July 17, 2016. The two texts were the Parable of the Leaven, and the story of Mary and Martha with Jesus.

And again he said, “To what should I compare the kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with^[a] three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

This sermon was preached at Hamline Church, using the text Genesis 2:1-3 (the 7th Day):

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. ² And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. ³ So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

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