Sunday, May 19, Pentecost – Acts 2:1-21. Also Psalm 104:24-34, 35b, Romans 8:22-27, John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15. A core theme of our readings today is the movement of the Spirit of God through the world and the transforming work it does. And a major symbol of that Spirit is fire. Fire is one of those aspects […]
Sunday, April 28, 2024 – John 15:1-8 Also Acts 8:26-40, Psalm 22:25-31, 1 John 4:7-21 Back in the winter of 2010, I drove from the southside of Chicago where I lived in Hyde Park and attended the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago to the Catholic seminary in Mundelein, IL to present my first biblical
Sunday, April 21, 2024 – John 10:11-18, Acts 4:5-12, Psalm 23, 1 John 3:16-24 Today is the day that the church calls “Good Shepherd Sunday.” It’s a day we recognize every year, and every year the readings include Psalm 23. Many of us can recite this psalm by heart, and maybe even feel an immediate
Sunday, April 7, 2024 – the Sunday after Easter For this day, I decided to repeat something I did in 2023 that I plan to keep as an annual tradition. After all the intensity of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, rather than writing a sermon based on the readings, I shared an incredible short story
This is the sermon that I wrote for Good Friday, 2024, that ironically I “forgot” to preach. You see, I’d written it, I printed it out, I took it to church, and…it stayed in my office. I didn’t even realize I’d blown past the part in the bulletin that said “Sermon” until we were into
Maundy Thursday, March 28, 2024 – Mark 14: 17-31 Mark 14: 32-50 Also Psalm 116: 1-2, 12-19, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 When Jesus and his followers gathered the night before he was crucified, they weren’t just meeting up for a friendly meal. They were marking the feast of the Passover, the Jewish commemoration of their ancestors’
Sunday, March 24, 2024 – Mark 15:1-39 [40-47] Also Isaiah 50:4-9a, Psalm 31:9-16, Phillippians 2:5-11, Processional Gospel, John 12:12-16 In the great archetypal stories of myth, fairy tale, and sacred texts, we see represented the deepest truths about the human condition that can only be told symbolically because of the limits of human language and
Sunday, February 25, 2024 – Mark 8:31-38 Also Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16, Psalm 22:23-31, Romans 4:13-25 After I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in communications from Purdue University, nothing seemed to go the way I’d planned it. I originally thought I’d move to Florida to work for Walt Disney World, but that dream got cut off
Sunday, January 28, 2024 – Mark 1:21-28 A Problem of Language Today, I want to talk about healing. In our gospel text, we hear of a man healed by Jesus of an “unclean spirit.” Jesus clearly performs an exorcism of that demon. Now, I’ve heard tell of present-day exorcisms, and I’ve seen the movie, “The
Sunday, January 14, 2024 – John 1:43-51, also 1 Samuel 3:1-10, Psalm 139:1-6, 3-18, 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 We May Not Know God Last week, I talked about water and how much I loved being near the water. Which is kind of ironic, since I couldn’t swim without an inflatable tube until I was about 9
