Alleluia! Christ is risen! That must have been some sermon the disciples preached. I’m sure every preacher since then has wished she or he had a copy of it. I mean, sure, the mighty wind and all those tongues of flames must have helped get the message across. And it can’t have hurt that this rag-tag band of uneducated fishermen and laborers…
St. James' Episcopal Church – Mt. Airy, Maryland
Sermons by Rev. Dr. Bill Doggett (Page 2)
Alleluia! Christ is risen! And, we remember today, is rising still. The Feast of the Ascension is, I think, a strange holiday, just as the biblical stories we tell on this day are strange stories. Jesus, who has been walking the earth for forty days after his resurrection, gives some last-minute instructions to his friends and then disappears in a nimbus of…
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Every year on the fourth Sunday of Easter, we read a portion of the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel. The entire chapter is the account of Jesus describing himself as ”The Good Shepherd,” and contrasting his own care and sacrifice on behalf of his flock to that of the wolf, who is always seeking to harm the…
Alleluia! Christ is Risen! This Sunday’s gospel reading from Luke follows immediately after the famous account of Jesus’ appearance to two of his friends on the road to Emmaus after his death and resurrection. And the story we just heard seems very similar to the first part of the story from John’s gospel that we heard last Sunday about Doubting Thomas. So…
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Our gospel lesson today picks up where we left off last week. It’s still that first Easter day, but it is evening now, and Jesus is popping up all over the place to prove to his followers that he is risen, and, as we heard in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, pretty soon the…
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Mark was the first person that we know of to write down the story of Jesus’ life. In fact, it is from the beginning of Mark’s account of Jesus’ life that we get the name for these kinds of writings: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ” is how the book of Mark begins, and “Good…
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Is there anything as amazing as what we celebrate tonight? I’m not talking about Jesus rising from the dead, as amazing as that is. If that were the whole story of Easter, it would be a short tale, and few would be celebrating tonight. But Easter isn’t about the miraculous resuscitation of a first-century rabble-rouser. It’s about the…
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The haunting, aching cry that begins the Twenty-Second Psalm, the psalm Jesus cries out from the cross, speaks of terrible, existential aloneness. What are we to make of the Son of God, who, we are told, says these words from the cross as he dies? And what are we to make of the…
Sometimes there are words in the readings that just sort of stop you short. Sometimes it’s just the pronunciation, but often it’s a word or a name that is obviously important in the context, but whose meaning is so obscure to our modern ears that we’re just baffled. “Paraclete” comes to mind, that word for “advocate” that we only use any more…