Category: Sermons

No, I’m not talking about the beginning of the baseball season, nor of Duke’s convincing victory over WVU (sorry, Mountaineer friends). I’m talking about navigating last week’s complications without having run smack into any shoals. Oh, plus, there’s that whole Jesus thing.
 
My lectures ended a week ago last Friday, which might have triggered my annual end-of-year physical collapse, except that Pippa was here and I fought on to do as much with her as her sleep schedule, the weather, her interests, and the days allotted us permitted. Then I put her on her plane Thursday, and that might have triggered my annual end-of-year let-down plus missing-Pippa let-down, but it’s Holy Week and I had services in which to participate and a sermon to write. Then too, Friday was the anniversary of my father’s death, so that might have triggered my annual let-down, compounded with missing Pippa and missing my Dad, but I still had the sermon to write and services today. So I spent yesterday working on the sermon, chanted the Exsultet at this morning’s Easter Vigil (happy Baptism, Ruth! Happy baptismal anniversary, Si!), preached at the ten-thirty main Easter service (sermon included in the extended portion of the post), had a sip of celebratory champagne, and walked the two miles home.
 
So guess what it’s time for now.
 
I’ll finish eating (ferociously hungry) and have a wee lie-down. The Festal Evensong starts at 6:30, and I may take a cab tonight, or perhaps just give it a miss altogether. For now, though, I wish you all a happy Easter, and we’ll see how I feel in a few hours.
 
Continue reading “Alleluia!”

This morning’s sermon is one of those sermons that benefits from being preached once at the early service before I arrives for the main service of the morning. (Sadly, I didn’t preach at the early service today.) There are a number of edits I would make to tighten it up, to underscore some points I’d want to make sure were clearer. Although the congregation received it very warmly, it would have been significantly more satisfactory with a slightly longer gestation period.
 
Interstingly enough, one of the choir members came up after the service to show me that he had in fact been calculating the number of angels required to catch Jesus before he hit the ground. He and his friend and I had a convivial visit, discussing numbers we remember from science classes (Avogadro’s Number = 6.02 × 10^23 = the number of molecules in a mole, along with the Quadratic Formula and of relevance this morning, the rate at which falling bodies accelerate). I spent the rest of the day, though, wondering how one knew exactly how much force to reverse Jesus’ downward accelaration we could assign to each angel. Sermon after the fold….
Continue reading “What’s The Angel Constant?”

This morning’s sermon seems to have gone well, even among the people who helpfully noted before the service that they were expecting a strong one. The specially odd part is that (as you will see, if you’re so inclined) the sermon pivoted on the question of “self-esteem,” and whether Isaiah and Paul and Peter suffered from low self-esteem — so in commenting about how I felt about it, I have to observe a robust enough confidence that I can mention, in passing, that I see some rough patches.
 
Actually, my original draft began with a description of Chris Locke’s relentless polemic against bogus self-esteem-mongers. It got off to a great start, then modulated into the problems that arise when students arrive for study with a boatload of groundless self-esteem. But I try to be very, very cautious about saying things from the pulpit that I can easily imagine stirring up needless trouble, and if students were there it might have been problematic for me to suggest that I knew of over-confident students. Then too, the transition to the Scripture lessons wasn’t working out, so I scrapped that beginning and just started writing in the middle. Eventually a beginning paragraph attached itself to the middle, and I wrote the ending in the wee hours of this morning. Took a nap, walked to church, and — as I said before — people received it very generously.
 
All that being said, I’m pretty tired. I look forward to a comfortable night’s sleep, and I won’t bother getting to work by eight, the way I usually do. It feels good just anticipating it.
 
[Later: Kelvin has put the video of the sermon up — here it goes.]

 
 

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Continue reading “Semi-recursive Sermon Comments”

This morning’s services went well, especially since it was the first time several of us have celebrated this rite, especially together. Everything went relatively smoothly (if you allow for a couple of whispered prompts). I think I was not pitch-perfect on a couple of the chanted parts, but everyone was too polite to say anything.
 
Among the three morning services, we sweated through several layers of vestments — but there were no sacramental catastrophes, no awkward silences. Just a couple of extra genuflections, and heaven knows that won’t hurt me.
 
I’ll post the sermon in the extended section. for now, I’m taking the rest of the day without any productive activity (apart from walking the contrasting dogs: 10-pound Beatrice and 90-pound Scout).
 
Continue reading “Sauna High Mass”

This morning’s worship at St. Joseph’s went very well — no mix-ups in the readings, the congregation received the sermon very warmly, and Rhonda described me in extravagantly laudatory terms that set back my spiritual discipline of “receiving compliments gracefully” by about ten years.
 
I left out the line that tickled me yesterday (and still delights me; I’ll be looking for years for a good context in which to place this): “Many are called, but few are boatswain.” I’ll put the sermon as I actually preached it in the “More” section of the post.
 
Now, it’s time for me to walk the dog, drive to the airport, pick up my beloved and rhinoviral daughter, and eventually to settle in for the night. I’ll swing over to J. P. Kang’s blog (he assures me that “I started blogging seriously”). I’ll start thinking of random things about myself, since both Kazpah and Yroa tagged me for one of these internet exercises in self-disclosure (Kazpah asked for a less inquisitorial 7 items, but I’ll roll hers into Yroa’s and pad them out with a few more). Continue reading “Play It Again, Jonah”

Yesterday morning, I preached at Duke Divinity School’s daily chapel service (they allow fifteen minutes here!). It’s an odd experience, since I still don’t feel well-attuned to the chapel congregation (and the congregation itself changes a fair amount, depending on the kind of service that people are anticipating). I prepared for a more Baptist-inclined congregation than actually turned out; if I’d known who actually would be there, I’d have tuned it more toward sedentary-Methodo-piscopalians. I’m observing that because I’m an incurable rhetorical tinkerer, though, not because the service was markedly off-kilter.
 
In the course of the sermon, I coin* the neologism “bourgeoiscracy” to characterize the smothering ideology of self-congratulatory (upper-)middle-class normativity, the creepy pseudo-mystical side of which Chris chronicles. I had a few things in view, in deploying that term. First, it has a memorable sound: it vividly conveys the sense that it’s hard to pronounce (the chaplain, Sally, commented to me about that after the service); in that way, it’s a notch better than “bourgeoisity,” which was in my handwritten draft of the sermon. Second, I wanted to identify the way of life, not particular bourgeois people. It wasn’t a “Repent, sinner!” gesture, but a “this afflicts most of us to some extent; let’s name it and try to get over it” gesture. Third, it captures what I had in mind more satisfactorily than “mediocracy,” which I’ve used before to describe a similar condition, but which circulates even more widely. The word then constitutes a sort of auditory/cognitive piton onto which I can hang the points I wanted to develop. (I did the same sort of thing when I used “Sacramerica” in my Ekklesia Project talk).
 
The congregation seemed to receive the sermon well; most importantly, the rest of the service brought to bear a coherently Methodist iteration of Anglican liturgy and hymnody, and we all had a chance to pray and sing together. I’ll add the sermon itself in the “more” part of the post.

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* As I write this, I see that others have deployed the term before me, so I won’t make any far-reaching claim to have originated it. For the purposes of this entry, working on this sermon, I coined it — but others did get there first. (Even more people have used “bourgeoisity,” so I’m even gladder I chose “bourgeoiscracy” instead.)

 

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Continue reading “What It Was”

Yesterday’s sermon from Christ Church, New Haven. . .
 
Continue reading “Easter Sunday”

The Easter Vigil sermon from Christ Church, New Haven —
  Continue reading “Easter Vigil”

I’m in New Haven for the weekend, preaching through the Holy Week liturgies at Christ Church. Margaret and I have a special love for this congregation, so when Fr. Cobb invited me up to preach, I didn’t hesitate a second; we love to spend these sacred days at this church that’s meant so much for so long.
 
I’m still working on the Easter Day sermon, so I can’t take time to post everything I’d like to say about the sermons. That’s just as well, since my self-critical restlessness would impel me to want to point out all the loose ends, the inexact locutions that retrospect makes seem to prominent. Instead, without further ado, I’ll post yesterday evening’s sermon here, and this afternoon’s in the post above.
Continue reading “Maundy Thursday”

The sermon today went just fine, apart from the incomplete sentence toward the middle, which required that I improvise (unprepared) a bridge that modulated from the fragment to the next sentence. And the service was exquisite, the music lovely, and the relief when it was over, tremendous.
 
Continue reading “Hilary Term”

It will come as a complete shock to my friends to hear that somehow, between the study at home and my study at the Center (in other words in the short walk through the living room, out to the car, from the car in the parking lot upstairs to the office), I completely lost the manuscript for Sunday’s sermon. I have the computer file, of course — I just lost all the emendations I scribbled onto it as I read, reread, and improved it before the service. I’m pasting a version of it as best I can reconstruct it in the extended section.
 

 
And not only was Debra installed Sunday, but several of my Chicago-area students were priested: M.E., Susan, Heidi, Corinne, and Jeannie (and Janey, too, further afield). It was a busy weekend for the Holy Spirit!
 
Now, to square away some loose ends and finish our gift-shopping. . . .
Continue reading “As Best I Recall”

Yesterday evening I preached at a funeral (on unexpectedly short notice, with imprecise information regarding the readings — I got lucky that nothing vital hinged on the substituted reading, but one of the readings I’d been told to expect was not what was read). It went all right, but preaching at a funeral is pretty stressful, especially when you have less time to work up the homily than usual, and then all the more so when you hear a different lesson from what you were expecting. Anyway, I’ll append it in the extended section.

I heard a rumor that David Weinberger read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lecture and even had some comments on it; if he blogs it, I’ll delightedly link to him (and probably argue with him, since “AKMA and David arguing about hermeneutics” is like “David and AKMA breathing”).

Anyway, I’m drained from last night, and that’ before tonight’s service at St Luke’s celebrating our rector’s investiture. Tomorrow night Seabury’s celebrating a U2charist, plus we’re entertaining a candidate for our librarian’s position. I’m even more tired just thinking about it.

Someone, hire Gary!
Continue reading “Exhausted Words”