Just Blue

A sermon by laypreacher Christine Peterson

Today, as you all know, is Fathers' Day. While I obviously am not a father, I do have a father, and Paul's message to the Galatians this morning put me in mind of a story about him that I want to share with you.
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The Tragedy that Turned

A sermon about grace edging out disaster

Today we watch a tragedy unfolding in three acts. Act I, set on a rooftop patio in Jerusalem, around an al fresco dining table. Jesus shares a final foreboding meal with his friends. “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you,” he begins, “before I suffer.” “Before I suffer”—these are strange words to start out a dinner dedicated to God’s eternal strength and victory!
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The Missing Person Report

A sermon about life-changing surprises

It all started with a missing person report. A group of out-of-towners were in Jerusalem for Passover, when one of them fell afoul of local authorities. He was tried on trumped up charges in a kangaroo court, got the death penalty, and was executed immediately, poor wretch.
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Doubt

A sermon about certainty and faith

“Do not doubt but believe.” These are the words Jesus speaks to the apostle Thomas, and they are read every year on the Sunday following the Resurrection: “Do not doubt but believe.”
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Open Our Eyes

A sermon about halting progress

Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold Christ in all his redeeming work.
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Room for the Holy Spirit

A sermon about leaps beyond all bounds

When I was growing up in the central Jersey suburbs, some of my high school classmates were transfers from Mount St. Mary’s Catholic, up in the hills north of town. They told many tantalizing stories about their parochial school experiences, including one about nuns who would bring along 12” rulers when they chaperoned dances. Rumor had it that whenever the sisters saw a young couple dancing too close they would step up and enforce the “12” rule,” reminding their young charges that they must “always leave room for the Holy Spirit.”
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Willing to Be Willing

A sermon about trusting God

Today we meet Abraham, the first follower of God for whom we’re given specific places and dates. At God’s instigation, at a time when Abraham is already 75 years old still childless, he and his relatives depart their west Asian homeland for the place we call Israel. As Abraham follows along the route he keeps listening for further messages from God. With each one he piles up a stone landmark to commemorate the interchange. After several hair-raising adventures with foreign leaders and food shortages, an exhausted Abraham is finally ready to settle down, when one night God speaks to him again—the dialogue we overhear in today’s reading.
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Transformation

A sermon about closing the gap between heaven and earth

I think it’s poetic justice that on this Fat Sunday, when wearing masks in church makes perfect sense, both Old and New Testament readings deal in veiled and unveiled faces. I do believe God has a sense of humor!

In our own day we seldom see covered faces any more. True, a few decades ago when ladies still wore hats to church, it was common to see a swatch of netting crossing their brows. And today at weddings a cascade of white gauze is not unusual floating over the blushing bride. But as for the burkahs of Muslim women, they frankly strike us as strange. We’ve grown too used to viewing one another out in the open, face-to-face, and so getting the gist of today’s scriptures will take a bit of digging.
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The Sound of Music

A sermon about what can happen while you’re making other plans

A few years ago while touring Austria, I got a glimpse of the von Trapp family home in Salzburg—a large, gracious mansion made famous through the Broadway musical, The Sound of Music. Perhaps you recall the true story of a young teacher named Maria who is determined to be a nun, despite her irrepressible spirit that raises eyebrows around the convent. When a local widower calls seeking a tutor for his daughter, the mother superior seizes the opportunity to get Maria out of the house for awhile.
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Love in God’s House

A sermon about love that leads us somewhere

By now having officiated at about a hundred weddings, I can no longer hear someone read 1 Corinthians 13 without also hearing the rustle of white satin, and the throat clearing of nervous grooms.

St. Paul’s famous paean to love is far and away the most popular scripture read at weddings—repeatedly selected by brides and grooms, I am sure, in sincere belief that Paul is talking about the romantic love that is saturating the moment.
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Through God's Eyes

A sermon about God's thumb on our scale

Even though you all began without me this morning, I know just how you began. You began with that wonderful prayer about reading, marking, learning and inwardly digesting scripture, building up blessed hope for everlasting life. I’m betting that as soon as that prayer was offered, you added your own audible Amen—your own affirmation of “so-be-it”—and then sat down to listen to the first reading. As you were praying and reading, the SCRIPT teens and I were gathered in my office around—you guessed it—our own reading from scripture, pooling insights about ways these pages offer a script for living our lives. It comes as no surprise that whenever we Episcopalians are asked what we’d like to learn more about, we say scripture. 80% of our Prayer Book is made up of scripture arranged for public worship. The lyrics of our hymnal are scripture set out for singing. Our entire worship service is one extended encounter with scripture designed to draw us in, and give us voice, in the telling of God’s unfolding story.
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The Lasting Judgement

A sermon About God's challenge for our future

Even though you all began without me this morning, I know just how you began. You began with that wonderful prayer about reading, marking, learning and inwardly digesting scripture, building up blessed hope for everlasting life. I’m betting that as soon as that prayer was offered, you added your own audible Amen—your own affirmation of “so-be-it”—and then sat down to listen to the first reading. As you were praying and reading, the SCRIPT teens and I were gathered in my office around—you guessed it—our own reading from scripture, pooling insights about ways these pages offer a script for living our lives. It comes as no surprise that whenever we Episcopalians are asked what we’d like to learn more about, we say scripture. 80% of our Prayer Book is made up of scripture arranged for public worship. The lyrics of our hymnal are scripture set out for singing. Our entire worship service is one extended encounter with scripture designed to draw us in, and give us voice, in the telling of God’s unfolding story.
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Crisis and Connection

A sermon about helping in Haiti

When I was a kid I proudly packed a shiny silver cap gun in my dime store holster and donned a wide-brimmed felt hat—just like all the other kids in my sleepy Shenandoah Valley hometown of Harrisonburg, Virginia. TV had barely entered our remote world, but radio was ripe, and we all instantly recognized the neighing of a horse and the clopping of hooves, signaling that the Lone Ranger was on his way. The Lone Ranger was our anonymous hero. Galloping into our bedrooms to the strains of the William Tell overture, astride a silver-white steed and peering through a mysterious mask, he fired only silver bullets and vowed to fight injustice wherever he found it. He invariably won the day, and then wheeled his trusty mount around, hollered “Hi-yo Silver!,” and galloped off into the sunset.
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A Future God Can Live With

A Sermon about fitting in with God’s happy ending

A week ago Luke and I took in a matinee, and what should pop up among the previews but a promo for the action thriller “2012.” Instantly the widescreen exploded with Technicolor chaos and carnage as solar flares superheated the core of the earth, plunging the crust into convulsions, and toppling California into the Pacific Ocean. Whereupon the ancient Yellowstone caldera erupted, and a mega-tsunami swamped the flanks of the Himalayas. The cast of adrenalin-charged characters narrowly escaped one catastrophe after another in a life-and-death race to reach lifeboats stowed high in the Himalayas, where an elite few would be buoyed above the apocalyptic flood.
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Mary’s Family Album

A sermon about memory and hope

Summer is a popular time for family weddings, family vacations and reunions, time for bringing far-flung relatives together again. Wherever there are reunions, there are cameras, lenses zooming and flashes flashing to capture the occasion for posterity, and bank a wealth of memories to bring home for those who hadn’t been there. More...


Our FICO Score

A sermon about everyday faithfulness

Do you know your FICO score? Or better yet, do you even know you have a FICO score? If not, it’s time we talked. FICO is a registered trademark of the Fair Isaac Corporation, the folks who pioneered credit ratings back in the 1950s. Credit rating has today ballooned into a huge industry, and the minute you or I become financially active we pop up on the screens of the big three rating companies, TransUnion, Equifax and Experian. More...


September 4, 2005

In the Name of Katrina’s Victims

The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen the misery of my people; I have heard their cry, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to bring them up to a good land flowing with milk and honey…I will be with you.”

During the past week hurricane Katrina has sorely tested this ancient image of the way God is with us. Our homes, our hearts and our headlines have been filled with cries of suffering from the Gulf states. First this absolutely horrific hurricane hits, and then catastrophic flooding and violence follow, pushing hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to the breaking point. As we look on helplessly we are haunted by their faces, their gestures, and their voices. Where is God in all this suffering, and how are we believers to respond? More...


Angels Among Us

St. Michael’s Day 2007

Just look at all the bright-eyed angels our children have made for St. Michael’s Day! Imagine being one of those angels, alighting the ladder heading up to heaven and giving us one last glance over the shoulder as he departs. Or imagine being one of those angels heading down the ladder to earth, squinting and sizing us up.

These angels have seen it all over the millennia—remember, they’re immortal and don’t get born and die like we do, they just go on and on until the end of time. Why, to the angels it seems like only yesterday that Jacob was double-crossing his brother and deceiving his father and running for his life. And so the angels held their breath in wonder as he fled…what would he do next? More...


Two Kinds of People

A sermon about the sort of people God works with Jesus says he tells the story in today’s Gospel for the benefit of two particular kinds of people: first, for people who trust in themselves, who feel well satisfied with the quality of their own lives; and second, for people who contemptuously look down their noses at others. Because Jesus lumps these two attitudes of self-satisfaction and contempt together, we’re safe to assume that they have something in common, that there is some link between complacently putting up with our own behavior, while putting other people down. Let’s take a close look at the two poster children Jesus gives us for these attitudes, the Pharisee and the tax man. More...


God's Messengers

A sermon about the unseen world

The Bible is a truly visionary book. From Genesis in the beginning to Revelation at the end, it is filled with accounts of people discovering more in the here and now than they ever imagined. And their discoveries make all the difference, because as soon as people see the world as it really is—heaven along with earth, unseen along with seen—then they are never the same again. More...


Two Roads

A sermon about choosing

In the turbulent 1920s, poet Robert Frost penned memorable lines about life choices. Frost captures here the universal human experience of having to choose one course of action over another: the regret we often feel over choosing one when that means foregoing the other; our procrastination and hesitation evoked by that regret; our anticipation about what the future might hold, tempered by equivocation over the exact future we desire. More...