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Homely Homilies

A collection of sermons and such written for my Homiletics class at School for Deacons. No actual parishioners were harmed in the giving of these sermons.

Saturday, May 14

Liturgical Sermon

The assignment here is basically to write a sermon that you could adapt to preach just about anywhere, at any time, making only a few changes to shoehorn the lectionary into it if needed. This is for when the Rector calls you at 7:00 a.m. and says you're doing the 8:00 a.m. service on your own. Good to have a Reserved Sermon to go with all that Reserved Sacrament.

The easiest kind of sermon to fit that bill is one which focuses on some aspect of the liturgy. I chose the General Confession, which of course means I'd better not get called to do a last-minute sermon during Easter.

We had to pick an appropriate gospel reading, and then find its Sunday, so I went with the second Sunday of Advent Year A, which has the John the Baptist reading.

As always, this is a preaching text, not an essay. The laws of punctuation do not apply here.

Isaiah 11:1-10
Romans 15:4
Matthew 3:1-12


I've owed my friend Judith a phone call for over a month now. There's no good reason why it hasn't happened; I get busy and I forget, basically.

It's been going on so long, though, that in my mind, it has become a THING. You know, a THING. A block between me and Judith - every time I look at something I bought on our trip to France, or see a dog that looks like hers, there's this little twinge in the back of my head. I have screwed up here, been a bad friend. And it's messing up not just my perception of our current relationship, it's coloring my memory of our past relationship, creating a distance that wasn't there before.

There's a word for that big block between us, which I picture as one of those huge anvils that Wile E. Coyote must have bought in bulk. That big, heavy thing is Sin. Ewww! Bad word!

It's hard to even talk seriously about sin sometimes. I want to draw it out to seeeee-iiiiin like the guys on TV. I want to whittle it down to something manageable, even mock-worthy.

But in today's gospel, we have this wild man compelling the people to REPENT, for the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent. Another loaded word.

I think the hardest thing about REPENT is that it really works against the way we like to think of ourselves. We're basically good people, with a couple of bad habits that we might be able to knock out during Lent. Yeah, Advent is a penitential season, too, but I think Lent will probably work better with my schedule. It's so crazy around the holidays!

In a few minutes, we're going to get to the part of the service called the General Confession. Some of us will read it out of the prayerbook, others can say it from memory. No matter how we say it, chances are many of us stopped hearing the words at some point.

It starts:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.

Most merciful God! I'm so happy that we start off that way!

One of my friends says that watching her two-year-old have his first major tantrum really gave her insight into the mind of God. Here's this small person, so consumed with emotion that he can't even speak, flailing about on the floor, while the one who could help him waits patiently for him to be in a condition to re-engage.

Wait! She's comparing us to two-year-olds?! BRATTY two-year-olds! We're not LIKE that.

Well, sin is defined as a separation from God, and isn't that what a lot of tantrums are about? Trying to work out that separation between parent and child?

God is merciful, and patient, even as we flail about and insist that it's not our fault, or cry out in frustration that we didn't get what we wanted, or become angry that someone else got it instead.

We confess that we have sinned against this merciful God in thought, word, and deed, and not just by doing the wrong things, but by not doing the right things.

Then we get more specific,

We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

What I love about this prayer is that it just assumes that we're all going to have done things that fit into the above categories. And if maybe we did do ok at loving God with our whole heart this week, notice that there's no I in confession.

Ok, there is an I, but we still pray as WE, all of us, in this soup together. Your sins, my sins, the sins of that other guy are all the same. The details may be different, but it's all the same sin - not loving God with our whole heart, and not loving each other.

We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.

I really want another word for sorry. Not for in this prayer, but I want a word that I don't also use when I run into someone's cart at the supermarket. Because I can't guarantee that my sorry there doesn't actually mean 'get out of the diet coke aisle if you can't drive that thing!'

I just assume I always have some things for the not loving my neighbor part.

But sorry is what we have to work with, and at least here it is not an empty expression of vague regret. How do we know that? Because there's no way that a fake supermarket apology is going to be followed by humble repentance.

We humbly repent. Not, 'we say we're sorry but we're secretly thinking we were right' or 'I think this is a stupid rule anyway.' To repent is to turn towards God and walk towards him, which often means changing paths completely. All repentance comes out of humility, out of giving up the need to be right.

I go back to the idea of God as the patient father waiting for sense to return at the last part of the prayer.

For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in Your will, and walk in Your ways, to the glory of Your name. Amen

The end is like a coming-to, opening our eyes to a different way of being, a different kind of relationship. It's a re-aligning. Note that we ask that we may DELIGHT in God's will. Not slog along on the path, walking in his ways because someone says it's the right thing to do. Not giving up something grudgingly, but seeing clearly that God's will for us is the source of true joy, and following with a grateful heart

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Proper 17 Year B

forgot to post this one before

Deuteronomy 4:1-9
Ephesians 6:10-20
Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23

Proper 17 Year B

Do you like making lists? I do. I like listing all of the things I have to do, and it's really satisfying to check them off one by one as each task is finished. I think I would have made a great Pharisee.

Imagine how comforting it would be if you could look at a list of tasks every day and give yourself a grade on the God Scale. Wellll...let's see...I washed all the bronze kettles in the correct ritual manner, didn't touch anything that might defile me, and I said all of my prayers...ok, most of my prayers. I may have rushed through that last one. I guess I get a B for prayers today, but I still have a B+ average and that should be enough to get me into heaven, right?

Or, better yet, I did everything I was supposed to do today, and now I'm God's favorite person! Seriously, I'm all he ever talks about. The saints roll their eyes in boredom as he goes on and on about how great I am.

See, the easy first reading on today's gospel is, 'oh, those crazy Pharisees, with their rules and traditions and doctrine! I'm so glad I am not like them.'

Except, you know, when I am. Left to my own devices, I can easily slip into observing the letter of the law, blindly following ritual and tradition. And maybe tut-tuting at those who disregard the CORRECT way to hold the chalice at the altar, as it was taught to me.

I do this because I need to keep God in his cage, where I can control him. If I have a list of small actions I can do which please God, whether it's a magic way of washing things, or wearing specific jewelry or colors, or lighting candles in a certain place at a certain time with certain specific prayers, then I take away a bit of his power. Reducing God to a petty tyrant who is easily appeased by outward form makes Him into something familiar. I've worked for this kind of boss before, and I know how to coast by.

Jesus isn't going to let us get away with this, of course, saying,

'This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.'

Then he lists the REAL sins that defile a person, none of which involve doing or not doing pretty things to show God how much we love him. Each word is, for someone in this congregation, a cause to cringe, to feel that inward contraction of recognition and shame.

Of course, even as I say that, my first reaction is to go back to the list of sins and try to see how many of them I have to answer for, and once I do that I will probably try to figure out where that ranks me among the congregation as a whole. I suspect that being a Pharisee involved a lot of that sort of thing. If you're giving yourself a Holiness Grade, it's a good bet that you're giving one to everyone else, too.

Do you see how quickly that sort of thing leads us away from being a community of believers and closer to being a Junior High School gym class? Can you be in community with people you're looking down on? Can you build trust and fellowship in that kind of environment?

Hint: the answer is...no.

What's going to happen if we let God out of the cage, though? What if we take away his job as Chief Handwashing Inspector and let him reveal himself to us in his fullness?

What if we step up and admit that our sins are real and serious? What if we - stay with me here - admit that we are broken and in deeply in need of healing and grace? What kind of environment is that going to create here? What if you knew the secret, inner broken-ness of the person sitting five seats away from you, and that person knew your secret, inner broken-ness?

Assume that moving away and changing your name is not an option.

What would that look like for our common life together? See, here's my theory - the Pharisees were most concerned with how they treated God, with gaining God's favor. Jesus is telling us that the way that we are with each other is what matters. When we stop worrying about whose bronze kettles are clean and start trying to uphold one another, we do God's work, and we encounter the risen Christ. God blesses us through other people. And that can't happen if we're using our own petty rules to keep us separate.

Try letting God out of the cage just a little bit this week. Ask God to take away some of your misguided ideas about who he is and what he wants. Try to see people the way that God sees them. Let him soften your eyes and your heart.

Try letting yourself out of the cage a bit this week, too. In fact, start at coffee hour. Here, let me help you get the obvious discussions out of the way.

My, the price of gas is high.
I can't wait for the kids to be back in school.
The flowers today were lovely!
Yes, I think you should have another donut.
How about those [fill in sports team].

See, all the small talk has been used up, so now there's nothing to do but be real. Sit down with someone and talk about what is really scaring you right now, or what is really inspiring you right now. Talk about your hopes and plans. Talk about - talk about where you see God moving in your life. Talk about things you're struggling with as you try to follow Jesus.

THAT is what we're here for. We're not here to make sure that everyone kneels when they are supposed to kneel and stands when they are supposed to stand, we are here because we have been told that when we gather in Christ's name, he is among us. And that there is healing and wholeness and joy in his presence. Let him out of the cage!

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Saturday, March 12

Smelly Mitch

Sermon #2. My assignment was a funeral sermon. The fictitious decedent is a homeless man whose name was probably 'Mitch' and who was frequently incoherent and filthy when he came to the fictional church's lunch program. The service is for the lunch program's volunteer staff and clients.

Isaiah 61:1-3
1 John 3:1-2
John 10:11-16

The Bible talks about heaven, but there aren't as many specifics as we'd like. Hollywood has filled in a lot of it...St. Peter at the gate, everyone in white angel suits.

I'm something of an anxious person, so I am most concerned with what happens right after a person gets there - it would be just like me to blow things completely on my first day in heaven!

Fortunately, in my version you spend the first few days in orientation. You get a nifty binder with a map that shows where everything is, and some basic instructions on matters such as the dessert buffet and how to get a tee time. You also get the words to the Sanctus, because it's right there in our eucharistic prayer - angels and archangels forever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of the Lord's name:

Holy Holy Holy Lord
God of power and might
Heaven and earth are full of your glory
Hosanna in the highest.

I'm sure that somewhere on the internet is a forum for discussing which arrangement of the song they use in heaven.

Something else is happening while you're there getting fitted for your white suit...the world is peeling off of you, layer after layer.

Where you lived...gone
What kind of car you drove...gone
Your 2004 adjusted gross income...gone

Everything. Gone. Until all that is left is you, as a child of God, standing among the other children of God.

We don't know all that much about Mitch, but all we need to know is that he was a child of God. We don't even know for sure that Mitch was his real name. He died alone and will be buried without a name, except for the name that God knows. Only when God says it, it's always preceded by, "my beloved."

It's so easy to disappear, isn't it? Mitch sort of slipped into the shadows, between the cracks as we like to say. He was invisible to most people, because he couldn't participate in many aspects of society.

For one thing, Mitch wasn't anyone's target market. It's hard to exist in this culture without being part of some target market or another - there's always someone willing to sell you something. Desperate to sell you something, in fact. But when you can't buy anything, your value drops to zero and those cracks open up and you slip right between them.

There's another way to slip through the cracks - when your network of relationships withers away until finally there's no one to call, no one to share your ups and downs. Relationships are the way to stay connected. I'm glad that Mitch trusted us enough to let us get to know him, if only in small bursts.

For all we know, the people here at St. Ned of Flanders church may have been the only people Mitch talked to during his final weeks. Maybe only a few of us talked to him; it wasn't always easy to get through to Mitch, and some days all we could do was try to put a hand on his shoulder if he would let us touch him.

It's a cliché to say that every person has a story to tell, but ultimately the way we build a community is by sharing our stories. Telling a bit of your true story is a gift to the person you tell it to. I wish we knew more of Mitch's story, but it only overlapped our own stories in a few places and that's all we have.

We know the beginning of the story - a tiny baby entered the world. We know the end - Mitch died. In between he was our guest for a little while.

We can guess parts of Mitch's story from the way he was when we knew him. His appearance put up a barrier between him and most "decent" people. Perhaps some saw him as a warning of what can happen when you stop mattering to the market economy. Perhaps some saw him as a warning of failure, and hurried towards their snug homes a little faster. Some imagined what he must have done to deserve to be in that condition - things they themselves would not do. Some people saw Mitch and were thankful for their own safety nets, the ones that would catch them before they could slide through those cracks.

That's us, though. God does not see failure here. A friend of mine likes to say that God sees all of us through Jesus-tinted glasses. The grace and compassion Jesus showed during his brief time on earth were not an aberration, they are standard operating procedure for God.

The best thing we can do during our own brief time on earth is to try to be a conduit for that grace and compassion, to tell people the story of the God of power and might who loves us where we are right now. The God who knows what we can be and will pour out his grace to get us there.

In today's Gospel, Jesus tells a story about himself. He says, "I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep."

Jesus knew Mitch, and Jesus died for Mitch, and that's really all we need to know in order to celebrate Mitch's life. The rest of the story is just details.

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Sunday, February 20

First. Sermon. Ever.

Remember, kids, first rhymes with worst.
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Midweek Eucharist
Monday, December 26, 2005
Feast of St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr (why must those words appear together so often?)

Psalm 31 or 31:1-5;
Jeremiah 26:1-9,12-15;
Acts 6:8--7:2a,51c-60;
Matthew 23:34-39

Merry Christmas! Yesterday, as you may remember, we got that baby born - the baby who is called Emmanuel, or God is With Us.

So, where did today's readings come from? Is anyone out there scratching their heads and wondering why we suddenly have an action sequence in which poor Stephen gets stoned to death, so soon after we celebrated the birth of the Christ child? Don't we even get a day to coo over him and play with his widdle toes before, well, before all the blood and martyrdom and general unpleasantness creeps back in?

The thing is, these readings are about the same thing we talked about yesterday - GOD IS WITH US.

Of course, we just don't get it.

Jesus is angry here. His patience is worn thin, and why not? Prophets, sages, and scribes, all run out of town and whipped in the synagogue, just for telling the truth about God. We just don't get it! All this God! With us! And we JUST DON'T GET IT. Look at what happened to poor Jeremiah! Look at how they killed Stephen! We didn't get it before Jesus came, and we didn't get it after he rose from the dead. He rose! From the dead! And we still try to find ways to work around his very clear instructions for us. Pick. Up. Your. Cross. Follow!

There's a great middle part that is left out of today's reading from Acts, in which Stephen recounts the entire relationship between God and his people, from Abraham to Joseph in Egypt to Moses. He does not pull punches, and tells the story of the rebelliousness of the people of Israel, saying

'It was this Moses whom they rejected when they said, "Who made you a ruler and a judge?" and whom God now sent as both ruler and liberator through the angel who appeared to him in the bush. He led them out, having performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and in the wilderness for forty years. This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, "God will raise up a prophet for you from your own people as he raised me up." He is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors; and he received living oracles to give to us. Our ancestors were unwilling to obey him; instead, they pushed him aside, and in their hearts they turned back to Egypt, saying to Aaron, "Make gods for us who will lead the way for us; as for this Moses who led us out from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him." At that time they made a calf, offered a sacrifice to the idol, and revelled in the works of their hands. But God turned away from them and handed them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets:
"Did you offer to me slain victims and sacrifices
for forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?
No; you took along the tent of Moloch,
and the star of your god Rephan,the images that you made to worship;
so I will remove you beyond Babylon."

Now, this isn't all that threatening to the people listening. They all know the story. Then Stephen dumps it all right back on their laps, saying

'You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. You are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.'

The crowd listens, and then they deal with the problem. Stephen is stoned to death.

You know, there's something about a good persecution that really shows you what side of things you're on. We are unlikely to have to deal with that, though, so we have to try to divine the quality of our faith based on smaller things. It's easy to say that you would die for the Gospel when no one is likely to ask you to do so.

Sometimes it seems like the cross we're asked to carry is made of balsa wood and chewing gum, it's so light compared to what others have had to bear.

Since no one is persecuting us, we often turn to persecuting each other. We set up various litmus tests so we can draw the line between who is in and who is out, and the lines of demarcation just get narrower and more petty, so that we can more easily paste labels on each other. God is with us! Except for that guy over there. God's not so much with him.

There's a thing we do in Godly Play classes with children, after we tell the day's story, we ask, "where are you in the story?" Usually, the kid who seemed like he wasn't paying attention is the one who breaks in then with something that is so true it just about stops your heart. But it's too good a technique to just give to the children, so as I read today's gospel, I have to think - where are we in this story?

Well, I know where we want to believe we are. We're up there with Jesus! With Stephen! Saying dangerous things to the people with the stones and the whips! We're part of that little band who DOES get it!

Well, no, at least, probably not. We, too, have received the law as ordained by angels, but are we doing much better than the people at whom Jesus and Stephen directed their well-placed ire?

That's a hard thing to say, especially the day after Christmas, when we're all feeling pretty good about ourselves. I mean, on a day when the rest of the culture is celebrating National Half-Off Everything at the Mall Day, we're here at church! In the middle of the week! Surely WE understand something about doing God's will. Surely WE are among the disciples. Jesus wasn't talking about US!

Stephen got killed for pointing out that the moment when you're feeling pretty smug and holy is probably the moment when you are the farthest away from God. So I'm a little nervous here, because, well, I don't think things have changed much since then. We still hate to hear anyone say that what we're doing right now isn't what is expected of us. Or that we're headed in the wrong direction. Now we're more likely to react with stony silence than with stones, but the basic defensiveness is still there.

So where is the good news in all this? Maybe the good news is in
Stephen's last words, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." Sounds like a paraphrase of another famous parting line, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do."

This is what keeps us from sinking into despair when we see ourselves clearly, the knowledge that the grace of God is extended to us even in our ugliest moments. We don't get it, and we never will on this side of death. All we can do is keep trying to figure it out together. Through Jesus we can repent and try to move ourselves another fraction of inch closer to alignment with the will of God.

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