"We meet the mother of Jesus in this gospel not when she gives birth to his physical body, but when she gives birth to his ministry, at the wedding in Cana. The first time we see Jesus mother in John is at the beginning of the second chapter – ...

" In this last night with his disciples before his big showdown with the Empire Jesus does not tease them, or intimidate them, or reassure them with a show of strength, or sign of power. Instead God incarnate puts a towel around his waist and s...

"Today Jesus gets to sit and eat with the people who mean the most to him. These are friends who have walked with him for the past three years, who have loved him through everything. Martha, Mary, Lazarus, his apostles, the ones who know him be...

" I suppose I have some things in common with the elder son in this morning's gospel lesson. Whenever I encounter this parable I find myself feeling the most empathy for him – out there in the field fuming and feeling lost while his father cele...

"Maybe this is how we all perish, friends. By living as if we can earn love and favor from God by just being better than, or separate from, other people."text: Luke 13:1-9preached for St. Paul's Staten Island, Third Sunday...

"My least favorite version of the multi-verse is the one it feels like we are living in right now. It feels like people in our country are living in different universes from each other. I look at the world and see a disaster. My neighbor who vo...

"How do we know who we are? How do we know what that means?One way is through reflection on scripture, and participation in worship – liturgies like this one, the First Sunday in Lent, where we encounter ourselves again and again in tex...

"This child is God, come to be with us in the midst of all our brokenness, in the midst of every deep dark sadness, in the midst of oppression and danger and heartache and despair. Jesus is with us. The child who has been brought to be blessed ...

"It has been said that every preacher only has one sermon. The one core value that will show up in some way in every sermon she preaches. This morning we hear Jesus’ one sermon. In everything he says and does he will be preaching good ...

"This epiphany season we are invited to imagine a God whose grace doesn’t need a reason to flow, a world where the waters of baptism flow into the wine of our feast without needing a broken body in between. That’s not our world, not the one we’...

"There is no one ritual that can make you perfect or worthy or whole, but there is one God who loves you enough to be with you – who shows up over and over in ordinary ways, through ordinary moments, and every religious practice we do together ...

"What is interesting to me is not that some people leave Jesus here when things get real. What is interesting is that some of them stay. Jesus lays out the reality – following him is about to get hard, they will need to not just be next to him,...

“ for us, for Christians, there is no choosing the spiritual over the physical. Christians do not get to pick and choose what a life to experience and what to escape, and we are not called to anywhere but where we actually are.”Text: Jo...

“ We tend to think that belief means intellectual assent, or factual certainty. So if you hear that you need to believe in God, and in Jesus, you might think that you need to come to intellectual certainty about the existence of God or divinity...

“ How was Bathsheba presented to you, the first time her story crossed your awareness?  History and interpretation have been almost as cruel to this woman as her king was. She must have done something to prov...

"That’s the problem with strong men. It’s been a problem since the very first kingdom asked if they could have one. Strong men want to use the power we give them. They want to use the muscles they have. They want to provide borders and protecti...

" Because of our Trinity, we have permission to always be looking for a third way – because that’s what God does, and that’s who God is. We have permission, right there in the mysterious and unfathomable nature of our God, to be curious instead...

"So here is the challenge: We will meet people on the path ahead who are not like us. Who do not share very many, or any of the identities that matter most to us. People who enjoy privilege we don’t, who defy norms we are used to.And som...

"This Easter is harder to want, isn’t it? This is an Easter that is not about winning as much as it is about turning and re-orienting ourselves toward God and each other. This is an Easter that is less about a huge, visible victory and more abo...

"This is the commission that Jesus gives his community in the world, the little baby church, our ancestor. Forgive people, and love them. Forgive people and hold them fast, even when they doubt. Even when they don’t believe in the way that you ...

"Easter is not a fix, but it is an opening. Resurrection is an invitation. It is a stone rolled away, opening up possibilities we could never have dreamed on our own, God’s possibilities for justice and hope, after trauma, for heali...

"Friends, love isn’t a resource that can be used up or spent up. It isn’t all we need – Love is all we are. It is the engine that runs the world, the only action worth taking, the only identity worth living. "Text: John 13:1-17, 31b-35<...

"So if the resurrected and living body of Jesus is the answer – what is the question? Here it is: How do we survive, when the temple where we meet God and find our own identities as God’s people is destroyed? How can we be God’s people, if we d...

"Change is a thing that happens – you move to a new city, lose a relationship, a messiah is baptized and named. Transition is the process of a human being responding to change, and it takes a lot longer to happen than the change itself. Becomin...

"Words create worlds.I think this is precisely what Jesus is about in our gospel reading tonight. We may be tempted, as humans who inhabit our particular culture to read the beatitudes and try to make them an individual prescription for ...