Alleluia! Christ is Risen! Today is the feast of Pentecost, the fiftieth and last day of Eastertide. The word Pentecost simply means “fifty days,” and the disciples, you may have noticed, were observing the Jewish Pentecost – fifty days after Passover, when a very strange thing happened. This strange thing, the coming of the Holy Spirit into their lives, had been promised…
St. James' Episcopal Church – Mt. Airy, Maryland
Sermons on 2014 (Page 4)
Alleluia! Christ is risen! And, we remember today, is rising still. The Feast of the Ascension was a couple of days ago, but we always read the story of Jesus’ ascension on the Sunday following as well, on the last Sunday of Eastertide. The Feast of the Ascension is a strange holiday, I think, just as the biblical stories we tell on…
Alleluia! Christ is risen! In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus is trying to explain to the disciples what is going to happen next, and to ease their concerns about it. It takes a long time for Jesus to get his message across. Indeed, John devotes four whole chapters to this conversation, which takes place between the foot-washing at the Last Supper and Jesus’…
Alleluia! Christ is risen! I have preached on today’s gospel lesson, many, many times, but, as the song goes, “never on a Sunday.” This reading from John’s gospel is a favorite at funerals, and it has offered comfort to many. In the reading, Jesus tells his followers not to worry, because God’s house has lots of dwelling places, and they already know…
Alleluia! Christ is risen! The fourth Sunday of Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday, and we always take a break at this time from the stories of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances to read one of the several passages from the Gospels where Jesus uses the metaphor of shepherd and sheep to talk about our relationship with Jesus, with, God, and with the…
Alleluia, Christ is risen! Well, it’s day eight of our fifty day long Easter party. How are you doing? Partied out yet? Just getting going? It’s hard to sustain fifty days worth of celebration, isn’t it? Keep trying, though. How are we going to manage to celebrate for all of eternity if we haven’t got the stamina to have a go for…
Alleluia! Christ is risen! We’ve been retelling the story of Jesus’ last days this week, the awful story of Jesus’ hopes for humankind broken as Jesus is disbelieved, betrayed, deserted, abused and executed for the crime of preaching that God desires that our lives be better than they are: richer in love, deeper in fidelity, full of abundance and empty of fear.…
Alleluia! Christ is risen! We heard the stories of where we came from and who we are as God’s people, and now, at last, we have heard the story of where we are going. Beyond life, beyond death, through water and into light, with Jesus as our guide. How shall we celebrate our good fortune? How can we describe our joy? On…
Anyone who is in recovery from addiction, or knows someone in recovery, knows that the journey back from death’s door begins when you hit rock bottom – when you have lost more of the things that matter to you than you can possibly bear to lose, and you feel utterly helpless in the powerful grip of your addiction. Good Friday is that…
We begin Holy week in a dramatic, complicated way. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, if our liturgy seems a bit disjointed, with the excitement of the Palm Procession leading abruptly into the drama and despair of the Passion gospel, there’s a reason for that. The two don’t really belong together. What we have is the mash-up of two ancient…