a sermon on Jeremiah 2:4-13 and on Luke 14:1,7-14
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ear what the prophet Jeremiah spoke to Israel, five hundred years before the birth of Jesus:
Listen, as Jeremiah asks the nation, “Why have you forgotten the story in which you were born, the way of life that is true life? How could you have forgotten our collective birth story, of being freed from bondage in Egypt and carried through the desert, sustained by manna and by living water flowing in the midst of the arid wilderness?”
a sermon preached on Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
In our reading from the prophet Isaiah, we have heard hard words for a hot summer night; words challenging all of the ritual, liturgical and priestly practices of the people of Judah, of the city of Jerusalem.
Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!Jerusalem the holy city, set at the heart of what was meant to be a holy land and a holy people, now characterized as Sodom and Gomorrah; as being cut from the same cloth as the most debased and corrupt examples of a broken humanity that this people has in its collective memory. It is like calling a church a brothel, and at the same time accusing the government of being a mafia mob. (more…)
A note from Jamie Howison: Sunday August 1 saw us celebrating a baptism at saint benedict’s table, which meant I preached a slightly shortened sermon with a particular focus on the meaning of baptism. That same day, however, I had been invited to preach at the parish of St Mary Magdalene, and in that setting I really couldn’t talk about the baptism! What follows here is the text from the morning’s sermon, some of which found its way into my reflections in our evening liturgy. The texts for the sermon are Colossians 3:1-11 and Luke 12:13-21.
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ver the past six months or so, a lot of my free evenings and weekend afternoons have been given over to work on a biography of my great-grandfather, Sidney Smith. Smith was one of the founders of Winnipeg’s Elim Chapel, a noted lay preacher and conference speaker, and a confidant of some of the giants of the evangelical world of the first half of the 20th century.
He was also a highly successful grain merchant, and a very wealthy man. And as I’ve unpacked his story by reading through his sermon texts and correspondence, and by searching through his heavily underlined copy of the Scofield Reference Bible, it is clear that he experienced his wealth as being both a responsibility and a burden. His life-defining scriptural verse was: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” (Luke 12.48b) The underlining in his Bible marked any number of verses referring to the transitory nature of wealth—from Proverbs (23:4-5) “Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom. Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? for riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven”—and included the famous verse from Mark about it being “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (more…)
a sermon on the compact version of “the Lord’s Prayer,” Luke 11:1-13
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esus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’”
The disciples are looking for what? Some sort of spiritual formation or religious training of the sort that John the Baptist seems to have offered to his own disciples? Or maybe they just want something of what they see in Jesus; again and again, they’ve watched him quietly slip off into a space on his own and enter into prayer – into comm-union – with God. We want that, they think to themselves. (more…)
a sermon on Colossians 1:15-20
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mere fifteen verses into his letter to the church in Colossae, Paul suddenly launches into song. At first glance, we might not recognize it as such, as most of our translations don’t show the text as being of a different character from Paul’s usual prose. I suspect as we heard these verses read aloud here tonight, very few people would have had any sense that they were hearing poetry.
But that is what we read, and while he was composing his letter to the Colossian church, if Paul didn’t quite burst into song surely his soul was singing as these words were scratched across the parchment. Hear those words again:
a sermon for the Feast of St. Benedict, on Luke 10:25-37
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onight we’re marking not only the 7th Sunday after Pentecost, but also the Feast of St Benedict; our forebear in this faith, whose name this community bears. According to Stanley Hauerwas, the church is a “story-formed community;” a people that derives its common identity through the stories it tells. It is one of the reasons that church communities in this tradition are named for saints; to locate our life together in the context of a story of someone who has walked before us, and about whom there might just be a story worth telling. Benedict has much to teach us about what makes for a community of disciples, but tonight I want to focus on one particular piece; the extension of hospitality.
In his rule for communities, Benedict wrote, “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, who said: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’” Lest the monastic communities he founded had any question as to what kind of guest Benedict might have been talking about, he went on to add that “Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received.”
a sermon on Luke 10:1-20
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uring the 1980s when I was a theological student in Toronto, there was a man who would stand out on Yonge Street on Saturday afternoons, holding a sign that called people to repent, for the kingdom of God was drawing close; the judgement of God was about to descend. The sign was hand-lettered in black felt pen on cardboard, and was just about as battered as the man who carried it. If you paused, he’d thrust a tract into your hands, but his eyes seemed always focused somewhere else. He came across as being determined and urgent, yet frayed and worn by his work of being a voice crying out in that wilderness of the Yonge Street strip bars and porn shops. I suspect in the decades since he has died and found his peace, but there may be another who has stepped in to take his place.
a sermon on the texts 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14 and Luke 9:51-62
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ast year I wrote a piece for the national Anglican Journal, which was ostensibly a review of an album by Ravi Coltrane, but was in fact more a meditation on the challenge of succession; of “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Ravi Coltrane is a gifted and respected musician, an increasingly able jazz composer, and a creative soloist on his instrument; the tenor saxophone. But if ever a musician stood on the shoulder of a giant – or perhaps stood in a giant’s shadow – he is the one. His father was John Coltrane, the ground-breaking innovator whose relatively brief recording career produced a body of work that has now influenced generations of musicians. Ravi’s mother Alice Coltrane was also a musician, and her sometimes eccentric and avant-garde body of work also has its serious devotees.
How do you follow that? Here is what I wrote in my piece for the Journal:
Even people with little knowledge of jazz will know that to place the name “Coltrane” in the same sentence as the words “jazz” or “saxophonist” is to evoke the name “John.” John Coltrane towers in the jazz world; John Coltrane is “Trane.” Ravi Coltrane is not – and never will be – simply “Trane.”
a sermon on 1 Kings 19:1-15
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ast Sunday night I spoke about the nature of the prophet’s task, and how it had much to do with “speaking truth to power.” That night we read the story of how King Ahab and Queen Jezebel had played a game of power politics by which they framed Naboth and had him killed so that they might claim his vineyard for their own (1 Kings 21). In that narrative, we heard of how the prophet Elijah had engaged in the oftentimes costly business of speaking truth to power.
Well perhaps oddly, tonight’s reading from the 1st book of Kings is actually part of what precedes the story of Naboth and his vineyard; it is comes two chapters prior to that particular showdown. But Elijah had already been vocal in his criticism of the royal household, and in particular of its neglect of the inherited faith of Israel. He had publically faced down the so-called prophets of Ba’al, and unveiled their religious practices as being empty. This had all been a humiliation to the royal family, and particularly to Queen Jezebel who was a committed advocate of the religion of Ba’al.
More, than that, Elijah had incited the people to kill the discredited prophets of Ba’al, and now Jezebel is spitting poison – “‘So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.’” And so Elijah has packed his bags and fled for his life. (more…)
a sermon on the texts 1 Kings 21:1-21 and Luke 7:36-8:3
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alter Brueggemann identifies one of the key roles of the prophet as being that of “speaking truth to power.” In the world of royal Israel – a world in which both the palace and the temple were in principle committed to a torah-shaped life and faith – the prophets were the ones who dared to speak out when the priests and kings and queens of the nation had ceased to speak the mother-tongue of faith.
The story we read from the first book of Kings is a classic example of that daring act. King Ahab has decided that he would like to have the vineyard of Naboth for his own, to turn into a vegetable garden. Naboth, however, is not prepared to sell or trade his ancestral vineyard; the tie to a particular piece of land, tended by his forebears, is strong. Reflecting a theologically grounded understanding of land as gift, Naboth refuses to see this plot of land as being a simple commodity. Instead, it is part of what defines him and his family.
And so King Ahab goes home to sulk. “He lay down on his bed, turned away his face, and would not eat.” (more…)