In Christ’s death God gives the divine life for the world, takes the worst of suffering and shame up and makes of them, not nothing, but the truest glory, takes up death and makes out of it everlasting life. There is no greater beauty and nothing more worthy of our adoration than this, the death that shattered death like a china plate on a tile floor, the shame that showed us that what the world spits on is the place where God is, in all the beauty of heaven.
Category: sermons
sermon: “mystery (for trinity sunday)”
If we imagine that truth is the enemy of mystery, it is only because we live in a world that insists on “knowing” in a way that is cataloguing and possessive, that insists that what is “true” is something inert, something that can be examined from all sides and seen to hold together, something that can be exhausted.
sermon: “on Christian unity”
The unity for which Jesus prayed has nothing to do with agreement. It has nothing to do with shared language or priorities or even values, except inasmuch as our identity as a follower of Jesus Christ is totalizing.
sermon: “against(?) the good life”
We are like seeds, Paul says; what we start with may die, but it dies only so that the greater, truer, fuller thing might live, as the grain gives way to the wheat or the acorn to the oak or the seed-pod to the mesquite.
sermon: “on it goes”
The nature of and the problem with time is that it passes, carries us without hurrying and without pause away from each thing that happens to us, even the great joys, even the utter desolations, even the miracles, even the moments in which we are touched by the very finger of God.
sermon: “a vessel to hold”
The map is not the territory, but we humans are very small in the scheme of things and we need something to hold us and the immensity of our experiences in order to get through them, a light to see by, a sextant for the spangled heavens by night and a sketch of a coastline by day.
sermon: “onionskin”
And perhaps we see it, too: the Son of Man on the clouds in Daniel overlaid over top of this Jesus as though traced on onionskin paper, the divine king like a ghost over the suffering servant.
sermon: “sleep to wake”
We all fall asleep in the middle, and we all die before the end.
sermon: “on the widow’s value”
We hold inside ourselves the impossible contrast of preciousness in a world that does not value any living thing, of righteousness imputed to us and not earned or earnable, of the hope of eternal life even as our earthly lives are shaped by hate that kills and indifference that allows the weak to die.
sermon: “if you want it”
Death is over—if we want it. Jesus is Lord even of death and has pulled its stinger out. An absurd claim then as now, yet every one of Jesus’ disciples, the first ones Mary Magdalene told, died for it. Because it was true, and because there was power in it.
NOR ANY OTHER CREATED THING 