Maggie Breen1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 † Psalm 20 † 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17 † Mark 4:26-34 You can view a video recording of this sermon here.
Isn’t that the case with so much of what we experience? We take something in, and we react, sometimes quietly, sometimes less so, but so often out of these hard-earned unspoken assumptions that have this silent power to affect our lives and the lives of others.
Rosebay Willowherb, for me, used to be a sign of something bad and only something bad. It grew in my family’s yard starting in the late spring and early summer each year. Those stubborn stems with their long, thin, rough, dark green leaves that seemed to me to spiral like a screwdriver or a drill making its way through the low growth. And then as summer moved on those loud pink flowers, one atop the other, clamoring for the sky. And bees, lots of bees, would hang out in that slanting swath of pink and then the flowers would turn to these long thin seed capsules that would split open seemingly overnight to reveal this tangled mess of tiny, almost invisible brown seeds hidden in a mass of silk hairs that would carry them off in clouds.
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Scott AndersonIsaiah 40:21-31 † Psalm 147 † 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 † Mark 1:29-39
A video version can be found here. I need this word today. I need a reminder that this life, this faith, this God is so much bigger than I can imagine and even hope for. Over the years as I monitor the ebb and flow of my own faith, I’ve noted that moments in which it feels—to me, at least—that we are coming out of crisis into something that seems heavier with possibility, my own emotional well-being seems to move in the opposite direction. I struggle more. Doubt more. I wonder how it works for you. So I need this good word today. I need Isaiah’s rhetorical flourish: 21Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? Isaiah just piles it on, inundates us with reminders of what should be obvious to any of us who have paid much attention, who have taken the time to stop and pray as Jesus does in the midst of the swirl of activity and demand. Scott Anderson2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 † Luke 1:46b-55 † Romans 16:25-27 † Luke 1:26-38
A video version of this sermon can be found here. Would it surprise you to know that this story from Second Samuel, this story of the victorious King David, now settled in his reign, now looking to build a permanent temple for God did not actually come together at a time when “the king was settled in his house and the LORD had given him rest from all his enemies around him”? Would it surprise you to know that it came about much later, during captivity in Babylon, when the temple that David’s son Solomon ultimately built for the LORD lay in ruins along with much of the civilization Israel had known at its peak, when the best and the brightest and the most privileged of Israel’s citizens had been forced to resettle as refugees in a foreign land? Would it surprise you to know that it came about when there was no rest, no house, and no king?[i] Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you. Perhaps it surprises you no more than knowing the story of Mary and the angel Gabriel was written down a full generation or two later, at a time when this one whose birth is foretold, this Jesus the Messiah had been executed as an enemy of the state and the church, and this miraculous child John, of the eighty-something year-old Elizabeth, had been beheaded, and when the very structure of Jewish life that serves as the backdrop to this story had been undercut, when there was once again no rest, no house, and no king. What is it about this hope of ours, that it seems to thrive when things are unfinished, that it seems to flourish most in trouble, in suffering, and in need? What is it about this mysterious faith of ours, that it is strongest, according to Romans, when revealed after long ages of being kept secret? What is it about this love of ours, that it is made perfect in weakness? Scott AndersonIsaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 † Psalm 126 † 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 † John 1:6-8, 19-28
A video version of this sermon can be found here. Just about every Christmas season I return to W. H. Auden’s Christmas long poem “For the Time Being.” I’m not entirely sure why. It isn’t a particularly efficient or even rewarding exercise even as I am drawn to sputtering along in my reading. I do suspect it holds a certain inspiration for me, or at least the promise of it that I am at any moment apt to tap into a reserve of insight and understanding. Perhaps my motivation is wrapped up in some faulty psychology that supposes because it is thick, because it is hard work to understand that it must be worth it. I do get that possibility, so you armchair psychologists can just sit on your hands for the moment. In fact, I think it is the other side of that psychological coin that has something more to do with this strange Advent season in this extraordinary “coronatide” time. It’s the audacity of this time that captures me. It’s the foolishness of this faith that imagines we can mobilize the machinery of the hope required to cut a path through mountains and valleys to make the way straight and wide, when it all seems so, well, not that, so anything, but passable. Foolish indeed. Faith, like love, is never easy. Scott AndersonIsaiah 64:1-9 † Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19 † 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 † Mark 13:24-37
A video version of this sermon can be found here. There is no less light in the world. I understand this may be difficult for us to imagine on these days in our Pacific Northwest when light seems to be such a scarce commodity. The comments began soon after we said goodbye to Daylight Saving Time and gave ourselves that extra hour of sleep—a brief reward for the inundation of darkness that now affords us only 8 hours and change of this dripping, gray miasma we now call daylight. If you’re among the small group who still commute farther than from your bedroom to your, I don’t know, bedroom, you probably go to work and come home in this blanket of darkness. It can be overwhelming. Especially so this year. But, unless you believe in a flat earth, and the heavens as some kind of a literal canopy above it, we know this is simply a matter of perspective. There is no less light in the world. We are simply spending more time in the shadows these days as our earth has begun that part of its travels around the sun that radiates more energy and light on the southern hemisphere than the northern. It’s a matter of perspective. The sun shines just as bright. The light is there, along with the dark. It always is. It’s just that we don’t get the same angle on it that we do in those July days when the light lasts for 16 hours and the darkness is almost non-existent to those of us who go to bed by 10 or wake up after 5. Julie Kae SigarsExodus 12:1-14 † Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19 † 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 † John 13:1-17, 31b-35
The Three Days are a time of memory. We remember the stories that are important to us as the people of God. The same stories that have been important to the church for centuries. Yet they still speak to us today. In new ways. Part of the Three Days is about making all things new. Hope, Trust, Love. All things will be well. In this time of Lent, when we gave up far more than we thought we would….I have a new thing. I have learned a new dance. I have known it for, like, forever. Since I was a child. You have known it too. But know, it feels totally new. It is the hand washing dance. I bet you thought I would have a handwashing song. But no. It’s a dance. Scott AndersonJeremiah 2:4-13 † Psalm 81:1, 1—16 † Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 † Luke 14:1, 7-14
There’s a lot of things I love about doing this work I get to do with you. But one that always tends to bubble to the top for me is the privilege you sometimes give me to hold your stories—especially the most vulnerable and fragile ones. I wonder if you feel the same way about the life you share with one another? I wonder if you experience as well the mutual gift that it is to hold something fragile for someone else. I suspect those stories that feel most delicate for us feel that way because they scrape close to some of the deeper truths of our lives—those things we just can’t let go of, nor get past, the scars of our lives, the injuries that become something more. Their memories linger. They stay with us. Hold us and haunt us, and indelibly shape us. To share in those with you is, for me, to get close to bedrock, something deep and true and stable. Although it is also, and in the same breathless moment, to brush against something wild and feather-light. Maybe it’s something like this Hebrew notion of entertaining those angels unaware—our best nature and deepest truths—without knowing it, until the moment is past and all we have is the hindsight of resurrection and righteousness. |
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