Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

We are not Jesus. We carried the Spirit within us and we may try always to follow the Holy Spirit's guidance, but we are human and fallible and with God's grace, forgiving and forgiven. What temptations might we encounter this Lenten season and how might we respond?..

Do we have new ways of being or doing that we want to lean into,

and yet yield to the temptation of fear, resistance or self doubt? Do we

witness the pain and suffering in the world and feel the temptation to

withdrawal, to look away? We have temptations. We have options. Hopefully we

pray and listen for guidance. Hopefully we seek always to follow the path of love,

but we have temptations and options.

The people of Ukraine are facing gut-wrenching options, moment

to moment. To fight to defend their freedom, their homes, their country, or to

flee against the invasion, that's been violently and unjustly hoisted upon them.

Options to try to salvage anything of all they have built, or to retreat for

another opening. And not all have such options.

We are seeing such remarkable courage and devastating

suffering amid, such unthinkable circumstances. Most of the people of the

world, including some very brave souls in Russia are watching and feeling the

limitations of their, of our options. Desiring to send clear signals of

opposition and condemnation, with sanctions and demonstrations, seeking to

provide humanitarian support, wanting to avoid any action that will exacerbate

the situation and lead to more escalation.

...before Jesus knocked him off, his horse made him blind, gave

him his sight back and woke him up to the reality of God and his life. We might

say, oh, he used to be Jewish and now he's Christian. But what Paul's really

struggling with is he used to be kind of awful to other people and now he's trying to center his life on love.

He used to believe that it was okay to hate and marginalize and even harm other people for believing the wrong thing. And he believed there was

nothing more important than following the rules. And if we could all just get

it together and follow the rules and have a pure religion and a pure culture

and a pure society, if we could just do that, then maybe we'd see God's glory.

This is how Paul thought. And he's just been knocked down by

the truth. The truth of Jesus Christ, which is that love is here and now found,

present in the people around. And so he's struggling with that. He's

struggling with his own past...

We were just trying to get to the end, of this pandemic. And now we're in the midst of really doing our best simply to pray and hope that we're not about to enter into a war. This is a scary time and a hard time to be a person. And I did not get any degrees in geopolitics and no matter how much time I spend on the internet, I seem still not to be. So, I'm not going to try to solve all that with a couple of nice words about how if we just loved each other, we could get along because I

love a lot of people and it doesn't mean we all get along.

I will say this. I

was raised during the cold war and I was raised to believe certain things about

our enemies. I was raised to think of them in less than human. And if you are

paying attention to all that's going on in Russia and Ukraine, one of the

things that you can be aware of is that these Russian soldiers are being told

things about Ukrainians that are not true about who they are as people, when we

hide ourselves, unveil ourselves from the truth of who one another is, and we

don't pay attention to the glory and the beauty in one another's humanity,

everything breaks down.

Paul invites his church into thinking about the

resurrection as something completely different. He doesn't say you go into the

ground broken and are raised up fixed. He says, you go into the ground, a seed,

like one that is planted. And when you're raised up, it's like something new, a

new life, a new growth that is blossoming into being.

He compares this as Jesus did in his ministry. He compares

this understanding of death and resurrection, not to something being broken

down and then put back together not to something that was needed to be fixed

and is finally fixed. Paul and Jesus, both described death and resurrection as

a seed, going into the ground and being transformed into a plant.

Something that was becomes something new. Still has that

essence of what was carried within the seed, just like you and I will bear the

souls that have become immortal by the power of God. But to try to conceive of

what we will be when we are raised up again. It's sort of like a seed, trying

to understand what it'll look like after it comes back out of the ground,

something completely new, something completely different is happening.

We talk about Martin Luther King Jr. now, as if it's obvious.

He's this beloved figure that everyone points to. In fact, whenever there is

strife in our time, we point to him, especially white people, point to him and

say, why can't it be more like him. Except when he was doing what he was doing,

guess what they called him? A radical and an extremist.

You may be familiar with the letter from Birmingham Jail

that he wrote while in jail for protesting peacefully. You may not know that

that letter was a response, much like all the great Epistles we read on Sundays,

like Paul's letter is a response to his congregation in Corinth. Dr. King's

letter was a response to a group of clergy in Alabama. Six clergy people signed

that letter, two of them, Episcopal bishops. And they said, look, we're with

you on principle, but let's not be unreasonable, shall we? The letter that they

wrote was called, 'A Call for Unity'.

I want to call for unity. I want us to be united. I want us

to be on the same page. I don't want to be considered extreme. I'm scared of

some of the extreme things we've seen happening in this country, they terrified

me. But I'm convicted by the reality that people like us have so often been

extreme about being reasonable and moderate and not been willing to be

extremists for Jesus. And I don't mean going out and harming people in Jesus

name. I mean, the way Dr. King said, if you want to call me an extremist, call

me an extremist for love. May love be the truth of my life. And may it change

the way that I live.

Listen to Dr. Mark Jefferson of the Virginia Theological Seminary deliver part 4 of a 4 part series on Sunday, February 6, at Church of the Redeemer.

This sermon is part of Rev. Dr. Mark Jefferson's 200 sermon series to commemorate the 200th anniversary of VTS.

Listen to Dr. Mark Jefferson of the Virginia Theological Seminary deliver part 2 of a 4 part series on Sunday, February 6, at Church of the Redeemer.

This sermon is part of Rev. Dr. Mark Jefferson's 200 sermon series to commemorate the 200th anniversary of VTS.

Listen to Dr. Mark Jefferson of the Virginia Theological Seminary deliver part 3 of a 4 part series on Sunday, February 6, at Church of the Redeemer.

This sermon is part of Rev. Dr. Mark Jefferson's 200 sermon series to commemorate the 200th anniversary of VTS.

Listen to Dr. Mark Jefferson of the Virginia Theological Seminary deliver part 1 of a 4 part series on Sunday, February 6, at Church of the Redeemer.

This sermon is part of Rev. Dr. Mark Jefferson's 200 sermon series to commemorate the 200th anniversary of VTS.

These continue to be unusual times. Times that disrupt our complacency and routine, even beyond the pandemic, which may be the greatest disruptor of all...We find disruption in the Gospel reading today from Luke when Jesus is at the synagogue. And he tells the people present that today the scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Those were the ending words on last week's reading of the Gospel, and they are the starting words here this week...the words that follow enraged the crowd. Jesus' presence has been something that they marvel at. Didn't they know him? Didn't they know his parents? And then his words that a prophet gets without honor in his own hometown, that puts it in a whole different place. And pretty soon they're trying to drive him out of the town over the cliff, total disruption. I can imagine that synagogue was a buzz for weeks and weeks if not months to come.

"The truth of the Gospel as expressed by Paul is that God is already present and working and active in our lives. And the way that we act as if that's true, is by acknowledging our belonging and the belonging of those around us. We belong to each other. What's the most important piece in a puzzle?

A lot of us have been doing puzzles during the pandemic. I've been doing a lot of them. What's the most important piece? The one that's missing, right? Isn't that it? It doesn't matter if it's on the edge, or in the center, or over here, or an eye or a flower. It doesn't matter if you've got the whole puzzle going and a piece is missing how do you feel? Infuriated, incomplete, frustrated. This isn't right! We belong to each other completely and totally."