This past pandemic year, when the church closed to worship and the service of Eucharist, the year had one very small benefit and that was we were able to revisit the service of morning prayer. Now that, in and of itself, is not so great, because it is not really the service for Sunday worship; but it was good to rediscover it; and one of the choices for the last line in the service of morning prayer comes from this Ephesian reading we just had, to paraphrase, “God working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” It reminds me of something someone told me once, “I love reading the Bible, it quotes the prayer book so often.” Our Book of Common Prayer so commonly lifts phrases from the Bible that many of us have lines of scripture engrained in our very being, and don’t know…

When we look at religions, specifically ones that have a deity or deities, we parse out the answers to two fundamental questions. One is how does your God/ our God/ one’s God view the world, and the other is how does your God ask you to view the world. In other words, what attributes does God possess in response to the world, and how does God want you to respond to the world? The answers to these give us a sketch of our theology (God’s attributes) and then our ethics (how we respond to God being God, what does it mean for us?). One of the main characteristics we know of God when we start talking about God is compassion; so, let’s talk a bit about compassion. In the Gospel this week, we are struck with Jesus having compassion on the crowds because they were like sheep without a shepherd.…

See?! there is a reason why we don’t just open the Bible and let an 8-year-old child read it willy-nilly. This Gospel passage is one of the more gruesome passages in the Bible. Daughter Herodias could have had half the kingdom, or a pony, but no… “I’ll have his head on a platter” is her choice; the Bible is not really for the faint of heart. Speaking truth to power is not always all it is cracked up to be. We will circle around to this Gospel passage, but for now, let us leave this, because it is hard to start there. But yet, you have to acknowledge that Gospel. It’s just sitting there. . . right before the sermon. A few moments ago, we prayed to God “mercifully [to] receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things…

As followers of the Way, we sometimes find it hard to think about Jesus as being human. We know he was a man, but he was a much better human than I am—I think it’s that whole “born of a woman, but knew no sin” thing. Still, here is an example of something completely human happening to Jesus. He goes home (they say you can never go home again), and people from his hometown don’t think too much of him. His miracles are discounted because they “know who he is.” The lack of faith of the people from his hometown changes his ability to perform miracles. That is the subject for a different sermon, how expectation of God’s miracles helps to bring to fruition God’s miracles. Still, what a very human experience. Thankfully, (I think) we are not constrained to be who we were as children. Each of us grows…

Grace flows. God’s love flows in an overwhelming way, and often God’s love comes packaged as grace. The Greek word charis means grace. In the 2nd letter to the Corinthians, the word gets translated as any of the following: “favor, privilege, generous undertaking, generous act, and blessing” and yet none of these words really gets close to what is at the essence of the Greek word, which is the life-giving power of God. The reading from the Wisdom of Solomon lands heavily on this very same life-giving power of God. The Gospel is a beautiful sequence of stories which demonstrate that Jesus possesses this very same life-giving power of God.  As I am prone to say, Jesus shows us who God is; in this case, Jesus shows this life-giving power of God.  Jesus shows grace, Jesus shows favor, privilege, blessing.  Specifically, he shows this grace to those who would have…

Society has an expression—“the patience of Job.” Even if you haven’t read the Bible, you have probably heard the expression. We like to pretend we know what this means, like Job is really patient. If only we could be as patient as Job was. Most of us know the expression, but most of us don’t actually know the story behind it. Job’s story is essential this: he was considered a very prosperous individual, but because Satan decided that Job should be tested, he lost most of his family, his property, etc. Most of the book we hear Job lamenting that he has been good and yet is still suffering. He tells whoever will listen that his suffering is undeserved. And this is in the backdrop of the Jewish religion, specifically the Deuteronomist’s approach, which is very similar to what we now know as a prosperity Gospel—good things happen to good…