St. Mark's New Canaan

All Saints' Sunday. 
Some marathon runners complain that anyone can enter the race and call themselves a "marathoner" these days. Do we have similar thoughts about who we consider saints in the Church? Maybe, just like running a race, we find we still have an important role to play simply by entering, and we can still be an example for others.

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The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost. 
Jesus' teaching about loving our neighbor as ourselves is found across many other religions, and many of us know it as the Golden Rule. It's a phrase that makes for great bumper stickers but is much harder to follow. In a time of war and political divisions, how do we follow the radical call to see people on all sides as our neighbors?

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The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost. 

Our spiritual lives are sometimes thought of as separate from all the other areas of life. The Very Reverend Dr. Andrew McGowan, Dean and President of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University, points toward Jesus' response on what should be given to Caesar and to God as a way of helping us see how everything ultimately belongs to God.

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The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost. 
Jesus' parable about guests at a wedding banquet shares some interesting parallels with an episode of "The Crown". Both feature people being tested and judged for what they're wearing. Should we be worried that God will reject us if we fail some sort of test, or is the real message about what we should "clothe ourselves in" as part of God's kingdom?

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The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost. 
What can we learn from the life of St. Francis? His example, along with a parable from Jesus, teaches us to see the world as God does and shows us what is possible when we learn to let go and live simply.

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The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost. 
A youth of St. Mark's once asked Dean Robert if we are in control of our lives or if God is. The answer lies in the stories of a God who relentlessly pursues us and who asks us to listen rather than hardening our hearts.

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The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. 
What do Israelites and vineyard workers have in common? In this week's readings, they can't seem to stop complaining. Like the people in these Biblical stories, we usually HEAR nothing but the words being spoken to us. How might our view of others shift if we learned to LISTEN for the lived experiences that lay beneath those words?

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost. 
Jesus' parable about a forgiven man who is punished for refusing to forgive another forces us to question if God's own forgiveness is conditional. Perhaps this parable is really trying to teach us how we open ourselves to forgiveness when we show it to others, and how we cut ourselves off from it when we deny it from others.

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The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost. 
When we end up in conflict with one another, we often want to push people out with no intention of bringing them back into community with us. Jesus, however, proposes a different path. 

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The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost. 
Why do we sometimes struggle to see ourselves as part of creation and how does that influence our actions? Two biblical examples serve as lessons about how ego can prevent us from seeing God and how our mindset can shift when we encounter God in the world around us.

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