“From This Window . . .” A Sermon for Westbrook Congregational Church UCC Genesis 22:1-14 September 17, 2017 I was a high school English teacher for a number of years. When I had to be out of the classroom, I tried to leave lesson plans for the substitute that were easy to implement. I...
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Though I preached this sermon only a couple of days ago, the events of the week have continued to unfold. Rather than try to update it, I will let it stand as its own little time capsule, even as I continue to figure out how to respond to what is happening around us. “Two...
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“You’ve Got to Carry That Weight” Matthew 10:37-42 A Sermon for First Church or Christ, Congregational East Haddam, Connecticut July 2, 2017 When it comes to the stories of our faith, there’s not a Sunday that goes by that we don’t start in the middle of something. Our passage for this morning is a...
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I’m taking a break from miracles this week and posting, instead, the manuscript of the sermon I preached Sunday at North Haven Congregational Church in North Haven Connecticut. I hope you find something here that speaks to you. “No Easy Way Out” Genesis 21:8-21, Matthew 10:24-39 We have sparrows in our barn. Behind our...
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I didn’t write last week because I was listening. Ginger and I spent the week in San Antonio at the Festival of Homiletics, or Preacher Geek Camp, as Ginger likes to call it. The week was inspiring, challenging, and invigorating. I came back with both my mind and my heart feeling stretched. Before I...
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I have had an interesting journey—actually, three—with this miracle over the past days. The first, I suppose, is the expected, or at least obvious, one: what exactly happened? Here’s a story told in all four gospels(Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:12-17, John 6:1-14), making it somewhat unusual for just that, and, though they offer...
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When I look back over the life of this blog, it seems I grow silent in Eastertide. Part of the reason, I am sure, is the recoil from keeping my Lenten Journal and writing straight for forty-something days and nights. I don’t know all the reasons, or that they are the same from year...
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I was a history major in college because of the professor who taught my Western Civilization course my first semester at Baylor. I’ve told this story before. I walked into Wallace Daniel’s classroom expecting to be told, once again, who won what war and what it meant for the rest of us and, instead,...
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I have been reading a lot about stories lately: how we tell them, how we hear them, how we live them. Telling a story is more than recounting events. In his book, The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, Sven Birkets writes: There is in fact no faster way to smother the core...
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The past few days I have been captured by James Carroll’s book, Christ Actually: Reimagining Faith in the Modern Age, in which Carroll articulates what faith in Christ looks like in the light of the Holocaust. He begins with a question Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend: “What keeps gnawing at me is this...
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