Y’all are lucky this Sunday. Though we celebrate the Transfiguration every year, I have never preached on this feast before. This sermon is all-new, it’s fresh. Continue reading
Feast of the Transfiguration
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Tag Archives: God’s Kingdom
The Kingdom of Heaven
Last week, I saw the Kingdom of Heaven on Rosemont Avenue.
That’s the name of the street where I live up in North Oak Cliff, and I want to offer a witness here this morning. The Kingdom of Heaven broke into the 600 block of North Rosemont Avenue, for a moment I glimpsed heaven there. Sure, it gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling, I smiled, and I nodded at how light and joyful a place the world could be. But it just as easily couldn’t have happened. It was just as possible, and maybe even easier, for nothing exceptional to have happened at all, for the Kingdom of Heaven to stay hidden and quiet and unseen, but there were two things that happened to enable this witness I’m giving you this morning.
First, somebody invited the Kingdom of Heaven to be part of their own daily life, and then second, somebody else saw and talked about what happened.
I heard the story from that witness, and now I share it with you. This neighbor had just gotten home from a long trip last Sunday night, and she found a note on her front door when she arrived: Continue reading
Shielded by a Consuming Fire
preached at St. Augustine’s Oak Cliff on Sunday, August 21, 2016.
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” God tells Jeremiah as he winds up to bestow a difficult call. I hear psalm 139 in this passage, the prayer which extolls God’s intimate knowledge of each person, how fearfully and wonderfully each one of us is made. Indeed, God created Jeremiah to be a prophet even as little Jerry’s bones were still being knit together and made calcified. More than being a determinist proof-text to affirm that no one ever really makes any life decision, we hear here that God cares so deeply for each life created that he dreams up how that person might make the world into God’s kingdom and then plants little seeds of that work right in to our very marrow.
I wonder if it’s something like Michael Phelps.
God’s Kingdom
Preached in Keenan Chapel at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, 21 June, 2015, Columbia, South Carolina.
I’ve never before preached from a pulpit here in Keenan Chapel. As many of you know, I’ve almost never used a manuscript. But the words God has for us this morning are too important to be trusted to my fickle, fragile mind; I had to commit them to paper, and I pray that we will receive them with humility, softness of heart, lament, and resolution.
May God take the coal of his holiness and cleanse my lips, that the living Word may take root in all our hearts this morning; through the name of the Living God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen. Continue reading
hope of things not seen 