Easter sermon

Below is my Easter sermon preached at the 9:00 Easter morning service. 
The text is Matthew 28:1-10.

Click below to read the sermon.

Easter Sunrise - The Easter sermon of St. John Chrysostom

For the Sunrise service on Easter morning, I preached the Easter sermon of St. John Chrysostom, pastor of Constantinople, from around 400AD.  In some Eastern churches, this sermon is a standard part of Easter services, and I think its rousing verses and invitation to all to the Easter feast are timeless and invigorating for any of us to hear.

Click below to read the sermon.

Easter is coming . . .

What if the testimony of the women at the tomb is true? (the following video is best viewed full screen, you can click the square button on the bottom right to do so)

Holy Week Services

New growth requires plowing

Happy holy week.  You are invited into this practice, especially into the holy three days (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil).   

The cross I wear each day, a gift from my parents, is a cross with a tree cut out of the center.  Lately I have had recurring themes coming to me from scripture, prayer, and discussions with others.  A lot of this has centered on growth, and especially how agricultural growth can be a metaphor for our lives of faith and service.

For tonight's intern support committee meeting I am sharing the following as a devotion.  It is from Parker Palmer's book Let your Life Speak, which I highly recommend to ANY Christian at any point in life, but deal specifically with vocation/calling, sense of self-worth, depression, and many other things.

"The spiritual journey is full of paradoxes.  One of them is that the humiliation that brings us down - down to ground on which it is safe to stand and fall - eventually takes us to a firmer and fuller sense of self. . . I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light.  I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace it all. . .
". . . (speaking about emerging from depression:)  I was finally able to say yes to life, a choice for which I am grateful beyond measure, though how I found that yes remains a mystery to me.  At one fork in the long road back to wholeness - when I was in fact walking along a country road past a freshly plowed field - I found a poem taking form within me . . . :

Harrowing

The plow has savaged this sweet field

Misshapen clods of earth kicked up

Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view

Last year's growth demolished by the blade.

I have plowed my life this way

Turned over a whole history

Looking for roots of what went wrong

Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.

Enough.  The job is done.

Whatever's been uproted, let it be

Seedbed for the growing that's to come

I plowed to unearth last year's reasons -

The farmer plows to plant a greening season."

Christian faith, as I know it in my own life, is all about paradox, and Holy Week is the ultimate of those paradoxes.  In order to conquer death, God, God's very self must die.  In order to plant new growth, sometimes the field has to be plowed.  I started Lent with an Ash Wednesday sermon on how burning the field created new growth in my dad's corn field, and I suppose it has come full circle.  Now new life is right on the horizon for us - because we know how the Passion story really ends. . .

Perhaps it is also fitting that my favorite Easter hymn is "Now the Green Blade Rises"

Sermon for 4/10 - Lazarus Sunday

Most people are familiar with the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead in the gospel of John.  There is also the Lazarus Effect, a project to provide people, especially in rural and impoverished areas of Africa, with anti-retroviral drugs to treat AIDS which can restore them to life and health in an astounding way.  You can see the moving documentary on this, The Lazarus Effect, by clicking here.
There are parts of the Lazarus text, though, that ring in my ears.  Read the sermon below - see what sticks for you - but remember Christ is always breaking through with new life for you.

Sermon 4/3/11 - Jesus heals the blind man, John 9

Healing. It has weighed heavy on my heart the last week, in places and people near and far, how healing is so badly needed. And as much as how painfully we may sometimes need physical healing, or restoration, or calm, I think most of all we need one thing, assurance of God's presence and love. It sounds so simple...
The gospel reading for this Sunday, 4/3, was the whole ninth chapter of the gospel of John. This details Jesus' healing of a blind man, and the long discussion that happens from it between the man, the Pharisees, the man's parents, and Jesus. Understanding Jesus' identity is at the center of this and many other stories in this gospel.
Click below to read the sermon.