Sermons from St. Anne's in-the-Fields

“It feels like this is something of our last Sunday of the school year, before we shift into summer mode next week with one 9am service. It’s also like we are at this societal moment of pivoting out of COVID-19 restrictions and more or less going back to normal – if there ever was such a thing. What’s been a bit disorienting for me was the radical abruptness of reopening. It was like the CDC and our civic leaders just got tired of the gray zone of semi-regulated communal life, and rather than slowly undimming the lights, they just decided to flick the switch on, and many of us, accustomed to the dark and coziness of quarantine, are squinting a little bit, trying to acclimate to the bright lights of normal.”

Lectionary Readings:
Genesis 3:8-15
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35

“Imagine a Portrait Gallery approached you and wanted to capture your image for posterity. How would you like to be portrayed? What picture of yourself would you like others to see? And do you think that picture ties up at all with the pictures others have of you? How would you be in this portrait? Where would you be? What emotion, position, look would just capture you? What would you like the picture to say about you – “I’m essentially happy”, “I’m rather serious”, “I used to be thin”, “I love my garden”? What would you want to hide – “I’ve got big ears”, “I’m lonely”, “I’m ill”? Would the portrait be incomplete if someone wasn’t with you in the portrait? Or would it look at how you are without them?“

Lectionary Readings:
Isaiah 6:1-8
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17
Psalm 29

“Human beings take around 650,000,000 breaths in their lifetime;

About 25,000 a day. How many of those are we aware? 

My Apple watch rings once an hour with a reminder to Breathe. 

It’s kind of annoying: 

What does it think I’ve been doing for the last hour? 

It doesn’t give me a reminder to tell my heart to pump blood

Or to my intestines to digest food.

Why does it suppose I’ve neglected my breath?”

Lectionary Readings:
Acts 2:1-21 or Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 8:22-27 or Acts 2:1-21
John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
Psalm 104:25-35, 37

“I am not a priest—I just poorly play one on Facebook live. My study of the Bible is relatively recent and shallow—I didn’t find my way into regular worship until I met Gene. Sure, my childhood featured Easter Sunday services in fluffy Talbots dresses and two-weeks each summer of Vacation Bible School… but those were less an expression of my belief in God than they were my being easily bribed by flowery dresses and weeks of time at Grandma’s house. 

I’m not a rector, but Iama writer. I’ve consumed a lot of stories in all sorts of different media. I love the craft of storytelling, and the tropes and tools we writers use to tell a story right. That’s why I think I love John’s gospel.”

Lectionary Readings:
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
1 John 5:9-13
John 17:6-19
Psalm 1

“Our tradition provides us two holy books, two sacred texts, to shape our spiritual imaginations. The first text is Holy Scripture – the Old and the New Testaments containing the great story of salvation, providing us the teachings of Jesus, and the examples of the earliest followers. The second Sacred Text is the Book of Creation. We don’t normally think of creation as a text, but all the elements are there. There are characters (both heroes and villains), and landscapes, and family conflicts, and resolutions and more bloody conflicts. And like any text, or book, it’s there for the reader to interpret it. To try and make sense out of it. What’s it about? Can we discern a plot?”

Lectionary Readings:
Acts 10:44-48
1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17
Psalm 98

“Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher, once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You're very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it's turtles all the way down! 

Two millennia ago, while the Stoics, and the Platonists, and the Aristotelians were holding forth about the motions of the planets and the stars and the observable universe, in the back of the room, a little old man stands up, and clears his throat, and says something so preposterous you’d hardly believe it: it’s love all the way down.”

Lectionary Readings:
Acts 8:26-40
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8
Psalm 22:24-30

“This fourth Sunday of the Easter season is awash in images of shepherds and flocks. This Gospel passage, and the 23rd psalm from which its imagery derives. The original audience listening to Rabbi Jesus would have been more than familiar with the frequent use of images of sheep and flocks in scripture and teaching. 

Years ago, when I dropped out of college for a bit of time that was graciously considered by the dean of students as a “leave of absence”, I lived on a farm in the Upper Connecticut Valley in New Hampshire. This farm raised blueberries and trees and was self-sustaining for its own produce. Living there was, quite literally, living off the land. Like most New England farmers, the man who owned the  farm was responsive to his neighbors’ needs. Farming in New England is not for the faint of heart and you survive in solidarity with the other resolute souls who try to earn their living out of that stony ground and frequently harsh climate. One of the neighbors kept sheep, and when he would need to leave town for a time, we took care of his sheep. It was thus that I had a very short-career as a  not very capable shepherd. The Mediocre Shepherd, you might say.”

Lectionary Readings:
Acts 4:5-12
1 John 3:16-24
John 10:11-18
Psalm 23